Nearly all the Banias are Jains or Vaishnava Hindus. An account of the
Jain religion has been given in a separate article, and some notice
of the retention of Hindu practices by the Jains is contained in the
subordinate article on Parwar Bania. The Vaishnava Banias no less
than the Jains are strongly averse to the destruction of animal life,
and will not kill any living thing. Their principal deity is the god
Ganesh or Ganpati, the son of Mahadeo and Parvati, who is the god of
good-luck, wealth and prosperity. Ganesh is represented in sculpture
with the head of an elephant and riding on a rat, though the rat is now
covered by the body of the god and is scarcely visible. He has a small
body like a child's with a fat belly and round plump arms. Perhaps
his body signifies that he is figured as a boy, the son of Parvati
or Gauri. In former times grain was the main source of wealth, and
from the appearance of Ganesh it can be understood why he is the god
of overflowing granaries, and hence of wealth and good fortune. The
elephant is a sacred animal among Hindus, and that on which the king
rides. To have an elephant was a mark of wealth and distinction among
Banias, and the Jains harness the cars of their gods to elephants at
their great _rath_ or chariot festival. Gajpati or 'lord of elephants'
is a title given to a king; Gajanand or 'elephant-faced' is an epithet
of the god Ganesh and a favourite Hindu name. Gajvithi or the track
of the elephant is a name of the Milky Way, and indicates that there
is believed to be a divine elephant who takes this course through the
heavens. The elephant eats so much grain that only a comparatively
rich man can afford to keep one; and hence it is easy to understand
how the attribute of plenty or of wealth was associated with the divine
elephant as his special characteristic. Similarly the rat is connected
with overflowing granaries, because when there is much corn in a
Hindu house or store-shed there will be many rats; thus a multitude
of rats implied a rich household, and so this animal too came to be a
symbol of wealth. The Hindus do not now consider the rat sacred, but
they have a tenderness for it, especially in the Maratha country. The
more bigoted of them objected to rats being poisoned as a means of
checking plague, though observation has fully convinced them that rats
spread the plague; and in the Bania hospitals, formerly maintained for
preserving the lives of animals, a number of rats were usually to be
found. The rat, in fact, may now be said to stand to Ganpati in the
position of a disreputable poor relation. No attempt is made to deny
his existence, but he is kept in the background as far as possible. The
god Ganpati is also associated with wealth of grain through his
parentage. He is the offspring of Siva or Mahadeo and his wife Devi
or Gauri. Mahadeo is in this case probably taken in his beneficent
character of the deified bull; Devi in her most important aspect as
the great mother-goddess is the earth, but as mother of Ganesh she
is probably imagined in her special form of Gauri, the yellow one,
that is, the yellow corn. Gauri is closely associated with Ganesh, and
every Hindu bridal couple worship Gauri Ganesh together as an important
rite of the wedding. Their conjunction in this manner lends colour to
the idea that they are held to be mother and son. In Rajputana Gauri
is worshipped as the corn goddess at the Gangore festival about the
time of the vernal equinox, especially by women. The meaning of Gauri,
Colonel Tod states, is yellow, emblematic of the ripened harvest,
when the votaries of the goddess adore her effigies, in the shape
of a matron painted the colour of ripe corn. Here she is seen as
Ana-purna (the corn-goddess), the benefactress of mankind. "The rites
commence when the sun enters Aries (the opening of the Hindu year),
by a deputation to a spot beyond the city to bring earth for the image
of Gauri. A small trench is then excavated in which barley is sown;
the ground is irrigated and artificial heat supplied till the grain
germinates, when the females join hands and dance round it, invoking
the blessings of Gauri on their husbands. The young corn is then taken
up, distributed and presented by the females to the men, who wear it
in their turbans." [128] Thus if Ganesh is the son of Gauri he is the
offspring of the bull and the growing corn; and his genesis from the
elephant and the rat show him equally as the god of full granaries, and
hence of wealth and good fortune. We can understand therefore how he
is the special god of the Banias, who formerly must have dealt almost
entirely in grain, as coined money had not come into general use.