Hyderabad Bids Adieu To Ganesha With Devotion

The Ganesha idol immersion on Friday came with the joyous farewell cry of “Ganpati Bappa Morya, agle baras tu jaldi aa,” and Hyderabad found its own ways to make that promise of return larger.

Colour, music, bands, DJs and the spectacle of processions filled the main routes, while much smaller family rituals played out at home, where children turned steel thalis into drums and cardboard into makeshift cars for household idols.

The scale stretched from those improvised processions to the 69-foot Khairatabad Ganesh and the Balapur procession moving through the city towards Tank Bund, but the feeling at the end remained much more personal.

“Visarjan ke liye aate waqt toh khushi hoti hai, jaate waqt bura lagta hai (There is happiness on the way to immersion, but not so much when we have to go back),” said Vishnu from Asifnagar, who has been coming with his family for immersion for 18 years. This year, they came to Malkam Cheruvu, where families waited beside the immersion point while household idols went in one by one. One woman leaned towards the workers and called out, “Teen doobki lagao bhaiyya (Give him three dips, brother)”.

Shruti, a working professional whose family was there for its fourth year of immersion, had fitted the visit into an ordinary Friday. “Today is my working day. I took a couple of hours to come for the immersion and will go back to work after this,” she said. The sadness of saying goodbye had become familiar to her, and she said the anticipation of Ganesha returning the following year compensated for it.

The mood changed closer to the main procession route. Drummers from Palakkad in Kerala accompanied some processions until they joined the larger route, while Telangana dappu performers were also seen throughout the day. Families danced along, and some chose to spend several hours watching the idols pass rather than follow a procession of their own.

Spectator stretches included Moazzamjahi Market, Abids, Gunfoundry, Nizam College, Basheerbagh, Liberty Junction and the Dr Ambedkar Statue area. The Bhagyanagar Ganesh Utsav Samithi had Sri Ramanujacharya Sridharacharya Maharaj from Ayodhya as the chief guest during the day’s proceedings.

“We are around six families and come together every year. We park near Liberty and stay from the afternoon until late at night. We fix the time in our family group and meet here. The best part is spending the day together and seeing the different Ganesh idols,” said Shiva Kumar from Nagole.

Food and water became part of that long wait. Social-service groups distributed snacks free of cost along stretches of the route, cotton candy and popcorn were popular among visitors, and the Hyderabad water department distributed water sachets.

The procession also looked different this year because AI-made and AI-style imagery appeared frequently on posters and publicity material. The recurring visual language was easy to recognise: highly saturated colours, glossy Ganesha figures, dramatic halos of light, smooth digital textures and stylised display fonts. Official GHMC and CMC posters also used AI art and AI-style typography, while associations used similar imagery on their own posters.

Taking that a step further, members of an association procession in Kacheguda said that they first generated an image of Ganesha using AI and then used that picture as a reference for the physical idol they created.

Older sound traditions continued alongside that new visual language. Pune’s dhol-tasha groups had a stronger presence this season, while Hyderabad’s brass-band tradition continued through groups such as Pentiah Band and Sri Srinivasa Band Company. DJ-led processions, dappu performers and brass bands therefore occupied different stretches of the same immersion day.

Friday also brought an occasional interruption that had little to do with ritual. A truck carrying the Jiyaguda Ganesh broke down near Abids police station in the evening. A TGSRTC mechanical team stationed to repair procession vehicles attended to it and got it moving again within a few minutes.

Shiva Kumar and the other families near Liberty planned to stay until late at night. Their cars were parked, the meeting time had been fixed in the family group, and there were still more Ganesha idols to watch before they went home.