Inviting Ganesha

The temple,which has an unassuming pink facade and a tin shed outside for devotees to wait,is located above the Ranthambore fort,on the top of a hill. The difficult trek to reach it makes many tourists give it a miss,but priest Sanjay Dadhich receives several kilos of wedding invitations from all over the world. During the last wedding season,in April,he received about 20 kilos of invites every day,and expects the same trend from November to January. As weddings have become lavish,devotees now also send dried fruit and token money. Sometimes,the goodies get stolen on the way to the fort,and most envelopes arrive unsealed.

Dadhich,a fifth-generation priest looking after the temple,spares time to talk about the tradition,as the wedding season is currently off. Otherwise,his day is spent opening envelopes and reading aloud the contents of the card — if they are in Hindi or English. Those in other ­languages are opened before the Lord “for him to read them himself”.

He doesn’t know when the tradition began but legend has it that the first wedding invitation the temple received was that of Lord Krishna with Rukmini,even though the temple itself was built in the 11th century,long after that marriage. It is believed,he says,that Ganesha was not invited to ­Krishna’s wedding,and therefore,rats chewed up the path on which the ­marriage procession was moving. “Because of this belief,many Marwari families belonging to the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan,whether they are living in the state or outside the country,make sure to send their first wedding cards here,” says Dadhich. The temple keeps the cards for a year,after which they are dissolved in water and the paper recycled.