Thus, Ganesha infuses even in our children the right to food and then, it is no wonder that the cohort of Churchill who engineered the Bengal famine developed an innate hatred for the form of Ganesha.

He also destroys the false distinctions between the divine, the human and the non-human forms of life. He at once combines the non-human animal, the human form and the divine form (in the form of four hands).

For those civilisations which have thrived on the bifurcation of the divine and the human as well as human and the non-human as unbridgeable categories, what can be more shocking?

And this shock can only increase when Darwinian science also blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Today, the origin of Ganesha, the elephant-headed God of Hindu Dharma, is widely limited to one particular Puranic version. In this, Parvati creates Ganesha to protect her privacy and Shiva, infuriated by Ganesha challenging his right to enter Parvati's mansion, beheads him.

Later realising what he has done, Shiva gets the head of an elephant and attaches it to the body of the boy, creating the beloved form of the deity whom Hindus love so much.

In 2014, in a jovial way, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of this as the first plastic surgery and the ‘righteous indignation brigade’ went into hyper-action. “Mixing mythology and science” got essentialised as the RSS way of looking at history or rather pseudo-history.

As late as August 2019, almost after five years, this casual remark by the PM was dug out by a columnist who explained seriously its impossibility pointing out ‘a large human neck’s circumference would be around 48cm, while the smallest baby elephant’s neck would be around 120cm.’

Then he went on to declare in a pompous manner that ‘if Ganesh was not a human who needed plastic surgery, the plastic surgeon had to be a senior god who created junior gods.’

What Prime Minister made was not a policy statement. It was stated more in a lighter vein than in any seriousness that Ganesha should have been the first person to have undergone plastic surgery.

That being said, one need not think of it as literal but that the poets who sang the Puranas could conceive of an animal organ being transplanted to a human body is in itself a leap for human imagination.

So one wonders who is really against scientific temper — the PM or the columnists and outrage brigade which cling on to an off-the-cuff remark as if it has become the policy statement of the government.

Yet these are worrying times, particularly when it comes to Puranas. Everywhere in the world including the so-called Abrahamic religions, even history-specific narratives are being turned into poetic metaphors.

In the West, the rationalist secular human movements have played a great role in that transformation. Of course, there is a fundamentalist backlash which is a different story.

In India, the situation is tragically different.

As this writer has often pointed out, the so-called rationalists here take a literal, fundamentalist view of Puranas here and the so-called believers (for that is a wrong word for Hindus) often take a view of their deities as symbolic realities at another level.

The belief that the constant, high-voltage propaganda over the elephant-headed deity is nothing but a vile superstition brought by the Brahmins is in a way yielding results.

Spurred by inferiority complex, there are Hindus who look to explain their deities using terms such as ‘ancient aliens’. Not long ago, a famous Guru was recycling the decapitation of Ganesha by Shiva, with a liberal ascription of ‘alien technologies’ to his disciples.