The Ganesh Milk Phenomenon

The Need to Believe

The year was 1995. I was working at Chaibasa, a small District Head Quarters town in Bihar, now a part of Jharkhand. It was morning. I was returning from an official engagement at Ranchi. We stopped at a road-side tea-stall for the driver to have a tea-break. As I was wandering around to have a ‘leg-break’, my eyes caught the bold head-lines of a newspaper which another person was reading. The head-line screamed “GANESH DRINKINK MILK”. I picked up a newspaper from the tea-stall to have a glance at this attention-drawing news. It said that all over India, idols of Lord Ganesh were ‘drinking’ milk.

This had led to unprecedented rush at Ganesh temples all over India. It all started in Chandigarh. A person reportedly had a dream in which Lord Ganesh told him that ‘he would make his presence felt’. How this dream led to ‘milk-drinking idols’, remains a mystery. The news spread like wild fire; telephones buzzed; Hindus all over India and abroad were in the grip of the ‘miracle’. Sceptics visited temples to report the ‘hoax’ and returned amazed and humbled!

Scientists explained that it was the effect of surface tension, capillary action, viscosity and siphon. One scientist at Kolkata demonstrated that not only an upright Ganesh idol but an upside down icon, a flower vase and even a telephone receiver could attract milk. For this, it was said, certain conditions must be fulfilled: the shape of the part ‘sucking’ milk should be a soft curve similar to a crescent; the edge should go up and come down slightly; the surface should be wet and the milk should be in constant contact with the surface of the lower and tapering part.

One newspaper carried a photograph of a plastic jug ‘drinking’ milk along side an idol of Ganesh!

It was shown that the phenomenon was no miracle. Was it a hoax played by some, which became a delusion for others? In all the cases, the priests and devotees were informed over phone. Milk, a liquid, and not laddoos, Ganesh’s favourite, was chosen. Lord Ganesh was chosen, his trunk being of the suitable shape.

Why were so many people taken in by the delusion? Some rationalists attributed this to ignorance and sense of insecurity. One anthropologist explained the phenomenon as a manifestation of liminality. Liminality is a psychological, neurological or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious of being on the ‘threshold’ of, or between, two different existential planes. Liminal periods are the marginal neither-here-nor-there phases when established rules and phases are temporarily inverted.

The Ganesh milk phenomenon revealed some very deep-rooted psychological needs like the need to believe. This is why despite some serious attempts at distancing from the wide-spread rumour and objectivity, many got carried away. Nobody thought of measuring and comparing the milk that ‘disappeared’ and that which flowed down.

One scientist said, “As a scientist, I see miracles all around me : a grain of sand, a flower….. I believe in the principle of negative capability. Negative capability allows the uncertainty at all times. An important principle of science is never to be dogmatic and realize that the schism between scientific and moral laws has to exist. I always feel that individuals have a melancholy look on their faces. That Thursday, though, I saw a brightness, an elation, in everyone. I liked it. I think the hoax is worthwhile.”

It will be long before human society rejects all phenomena which have no scientific explanation. When in 1969 the first man who landed on the moon took off the spacecraft , the scientist who made that possible, knelt and prayed to God looking ‘heavenwards’!

Based on my entry in a competition held by a newspaper published from Kolkata.
Retrieved from my personal archive