Ganesh Chaturthi opens in Mumbai and Hyderabad with a 69-foot Khairatabad idol

Ganesh Chaturthi began on Monday across India as families and mandals installed clay idols of Ganesha in homes and street pandals. In the Mumbai panchang the Bhadrapada Shukla Chaturthi tithi started at 7:06 a.m. on 14 September and ends at 7:44 a.m. on 15 September. The recommended city puja window runs from 11:20 a.m. to 1:48 p.m. Visarjan, the immersion that closes the festival, falls on Anant Chaturdashi, Friday 25 September.

Mumbai's main public shrines are in their usual places: Lalbaugcha Raja at Putlabai Chawl in Lalbaug, GSB Seva Mandal at King's Circle in Matunga East, Andhericha Raja in Azad Nagar, Andheri West, Khetwadicha Ganraj in Girgaon, and Chinchpoklicha Chintamani in Parel-Chinchpokli. Markets sold idols, flowers and sweets through the morning. Smaller figures went home in taxis and on two-wheelers. Larger ones moved on decorated trucks with drummers. The city has deployed more than 16,800 police, including quick-response units, with extra assignments already planned for the immersion days when traffic and crowd density peak on the routes to the sea.

Hyderabad's centre of gravity is Khairatabad. Organisers there have put up a 69-foot, five-faced idol of Panchamukha Sankatahara Maha Ganapati. The five faces are described as earth, water, fire, air and space. The site is expected to draw more than 30 lakh visitors, three million people, before the idol is taken down for immersion. Telangana's governor has been invited to perform the first puja. Streets around the neighbourhood filled on Monday with drums and queues.

The festival marks Ganesha's birth and is kept as a public event in Maharashtra in the form Bal Gangadhar Tilak gave it in the 1890s, when household worship was moved into the street so that a political public could gather under a religious calendar. That history still sits under the police deployment and the pandal permits. It also sits under arguments about plaster-of-Paris idols and the load they put on creeks and the Arabian Sea on visarjan night. Municipal rules in Mumbai have tightened on material and on immersion sites in recent years. Enforcement still varies by mandal and by ward.

Monday's practical facts are smaller. A two-hour midday window for the main puja. A ten-day run to 25 September. A 69-foot statue in one Hyderabad neighbourhood built for a three-million-person footfall. A police line of 16,800 in Mumbai before the crowds that arrive on visarjan have even formed. Those numbers, not the hymns, will decide whether the next two weeks stay inside the plan the cities wrote in August.