Previous Year Question

The correct answer is Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

The worship of Ganapati had existed in Maharashtra much earlier as a family and religious tradition. Bal Gangadhar Tilak did not originate the Ganesh festival itself; rather, he popularized its public or ‘Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav’ form and used it as an instrument of social and political mass mobilization.

In 1893, Tilak gave the Ganesh festival a large-scale public form. Maharashtra Government material states that, in the context of British restrictions on political gatherings, Tilak transformed the private celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi into a Sarvajanik Utsav, with the objective of bringing people together.

An important purpose behind Tilak's initiative was to use a religious-cultural platform to bring together people who might not otherwise participate in ordinary political meetings. Public pandals increasingly became venues for speeches, cultural programmes and social activities.

The Ganesh festival thus ceased to be confined to religious observance alone and also became a means of promoting national consciousness and political awareness against colonial rule. The Press Information Bureau records that Tilak used Ganesh Utsav and Shivaji Jayanti to connect people with the freedom movement and promote political mobilization.

Tilak's initiative gave the festival a broader participatory character. By bringing people from different social groups together, it provided a new public platform for collective action and nationalist political mobilization.

The expression “national festival” in the question should not be read literally as referring to today's official category of National Festivals. The intended meaning is that Tilak transformed Maharashtra's traditional Ganapati celebration into a public, broad-based festival with a nationalist political character.