At the Fête de Ganesh in La Chapelle, food was more than something to eat. It was an offering, a protective symbol, a link to distant landscapes—and a vivid demonstration of how culture preserves biodiversity.

On Sunday, 30 August, the streets around La Chapelle in northern Paris were thick with incense, drumming, crushed coconut and jasmine. Many of the plants surrounding me were already familiar. During my years in Jamaica, I had developed a deep interest in ingredients such as neem, turmeric, moringa and mango, all of which grow abundantly there. I drank tea made with freshly picked neem leaves and used moringa leaves, pods and seeds in my cooking. In Jamaica, I had come to know these plants largely through flavour, nourishment and their local traditional uses. At the Ganesh Festival, I was encountering them in another light: as offerings, protective objects and carriers of sacred meaning.

As someone with a longstanding fascination for South Asia, I was not going to miss the procession. A flower-covered chariot carried Ganesha through the neighbourhood, followed by barefoot worshippers. Women walked beneath crowns of neem leaves, carrying vessels of fire. Men danced vigorously beneath great fans of peacock feathers. Along the route, coconuts accumulated in astonishing piles before being smashed against the road.

This was the annual Ganesh Festival—or Fête de Ganesh, as it is known here in France—organised by the Sri Manicka Vinayakar Alayam temple on rue Pajol. There is no verified attendance figure for the 2026 procession yet, but “thousands” is certainly no exaggeration. When I emerged from the Métro at 10:45 a.m., the crowd was quite literally growing by the minute. Previous editions have drawn tens of thousands of worshippers and spectators; in 2019, organisers expected as many as 50,000 people!

The scale was impressive, but numbers do not quite explain the experience. For several hours, a section of Paris became a moving sacred space—one constructed from music, bodies, plants, fruit, fire and food.

Who is Ganesha?

Ganesha, recognisable by his elephant head, is one of Hinduism’s most widely revered deities. Known in Tamil as Pillaiyar or Vinayagar, he is associated with wisdom, auspicious beginnings and the removal of obstacles. He is invoked before journeys, ceremonies and new ventures: the deity one approaches when hoping that a path will open rather than close.

Ganesh Chaturthi is celebrated in honour of Ganesha across India and throughout the Hindu diaspora, although its customs vary considerably between regions. The Paris celebration is specifically shaped by Tamil temple traditions. It is not an exact reproduction of the enormous public festivities associated with cities such as Mumbai, where temporary clay images are eventually immersed in water. In La Chapelle, the temple’s deities make a ceremonial visit into the city aboard decorated chariots.

Ganesha was accompanied by his brother Murugan, a particularly important deity in Tamil Hinduism. This helps explain the men dancing while carrying kavadis decorated with peacock feathers. A kavadi—literally a “burden”—is borne as an expression of devotion, gratitude or the fulfilment of a vow. The peacock is Murugan’s sacred vehicle, making the dancers’ vigorous, sometimes dizzying movements far more than a performance: they are devotion made physical. Onlookers offered the dancers sugary drinks to help sustain them through the exertion. At one point, a dancer appeared close to fainting, but his fellow worshippers quickly surrounded him, steadied him and helped him recover as the procession continued.

Why La Chapelle?

To understand why one of Paris’s largest Hindu celebrations takes place beneath the elevated Métro tracks of the 18th arrondissement, it is necessary to look in two directions: towards India and towards Sri Lanka.

France’s relationship with India predates the modern diaspora. The French East India Company established trading posts on the subcontinent from the seventeenth century. Pondicherry—now officially Puducherry—became the centre of French India, alongside territories including Karaikal, Mahé, Yanam and Chandernagore. These territories were transferred to India after independence, with de facto transfer in 1954 and the legal treaty taking effect in 1962.

This colonial history created enduring administrative, linguistic and family connections between France and Tamil-speaking southern India. Some inhabitants of the former French territories retained French nationality, and migration from Pondicherry and Karaikal contributed to the development of France’s Indian community. India’s Ministry of External Affairs now estimates the Indian diaspora in mainland France at approximately 119,000 people.

But La Chapelle’s story is not simply Indian. From the 1980s onward, Tamils fleeing Sri Lanka’s escalating ethnic conflict and civil war arrived in France in significant numbers. The area around La Chapelle and Gare du Nord developed into their commercial and cultural centre. Grocery shops, restaurants, sari stores, jewellery businesses, travel agencies, media outlets and places of worship turned a transport crossroads into what became known as “Little Jaffna,” after the Tamil-majority city and peninsula in northern Sri Lanka.

Not all members of the community live in La Chapelle today, but the neighbourhood remains an anchor: a place to shop, worship, exchange news, eat familiar food and encounter one’s language in public. The Fête de Ganesh makes that cultural geography visible to the rest of Paris.

Why break a coconut?

Few images from the procession were as powerful as the coconuts being thrown against the street. From a distance it appeared almost explosive: arms lifted, shells struck pavement, coconut water spreading everywhere. You’ll be able to see videos I posted on my Instagram page by the way.

In Hindu worship, the coconut is an auspicious offering. One interpretation compares its hard exterior to the ego or the illusion of the material world. Breaking it exposes the pure white interior and releases its water: a symbolic surrender of pride, hardness and self-importance before the divine. Ganesha, remover of obstacles, is offered something that must itself be broken open.

Many of the coconuts had been marked with yellow-orange turmeric and red kumkum. Turmeric is associated with purity, well-being and auspiciousness; kumkum with blessing, sacred presence and divine energy. I watched one man rub the coloured traces from the coconuts onto his hands, bringing the offering—and its blessing—into contact with his own body.

Elsewhere, worshippers carried plates holding coconuts, bananas, limes, mango leaves and incense. Each item functioned simultaneously as physical substance and sacred language. Fruit represents nourishment and abundance offered back to their divine source. Incense purifies the ritual space, while its rising smoke evokes prayer. Mango leaves are associated with vitality and auspicious beginnings. Limes, often displayed alongside chillies and neem at the entrances to local shops, are widely used as protective objects intended to absorb or repel harmful influences.

Since adopting a predominantly plant-based diet, I have come to see nature, food and divinity as inseparable. Food appears throughout the world’s religions and sacred texts—honey alone carries meaning across numerous traditions—but this connection felt especially vivid here. In Hindu practice, the ingredients were not merely symbols placed before the divine. They were living parts of the natural world through which devotion itself could be expressed.

The neem surrounding the women carrying fire also spoke this double language. It is a medicinal tree, but in Tamil religious traditions it additionally carries associations of purification, protection, healing and cooling. Fire, meanwhile, illuminates the deity and conveys the offering. These meanings can vary according to temple, family and vow; Hindu practice is too diverse for every leaf or flame to have one fixed translation.

In the motherland of mangoes

Then there were the mangoes.

They appeared sliced and dusted with chilli, stacked in cardboard boxes and displayed in varieties rarely encountered in an ordinary French supermarket. Some were green and firm, destined for pickles or savoury preparations. Others were intensely fragrant, softening towards gold.

Calling India the motherland of mangoes feels entirely natural. The fruit has been cultivated there for millennia and occupies an exceptional place in its literature, agriculture, cuisine and religious life. Botanically, the story is slightly more expansive: mango belongs to a region extending from the Indian subcontinent into Myanmar and Southeast Asia, and genetic research suggests a complex history involving distinct Indian and Southeast Asian groups rather than one simple point of domestication.

Culturally, however, few countries have developed a relationship with mango comparable to India’s. The country possesses an extraordinary inheritance of named cultivars, regional preferences and specialised uses. Mango can be unripe, sour and salted; grated into chutney; preserved with oil and spices; cooked into curries; pulped into drinks; or eaten at peak ripeness over a sink because neatness has ceased to matter.

The mango leaves in offering plates and above doorways were as significant as the fruit. Evergreen and resilient, they are used to signal abundance, fertility, hospitality and auspiciousness. The mango is not merely a dessert. Tree, leaf, shade, fruit and fragrance all belong to its cultural identity.

The grocery store as a library

Before the procession, I walked through La Chapelle’s grocery stores offered another kind of revelation. There were fresh moringa leaves and long moringa “drumstick” pods; okra; bitter melon, or karela; several pumpkins; and an almost taxonomic display of edible gourds—ridge gourd, sponge gourd and others varying in length, colour, texture and bitterness.

A conventional European supermarket can give the impression of abundance while repeatedly offering the same narrow selection. Here, the vegetable aisle functioned more like a library of plant knowledge. Each unfamiliar leaf or ridged fruit implied techniques: what to peel, what to salt, how to temper bitterness, which lentil to pair it with, which spice to fry first and which ingredient belongs in a soup, sambar, curry, poriyal or stir-fry.

That knowledge matters. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 75 percent of the world’s food is generated from only twelve plant and five animal species. Humanity has used thousands of plant species as food, yet the industrial food system increasingly depends on a remarkably small number of them. This narrowing makes diets less interesting, but it also makes agriculture more vulnerable.

South Asia should not be romanticised as untouched by industrialisation or the loss of crop diversity. It faces those pressures too. Nevertheless, its regional food cultures preserve extensive practical knowledge about edible leaves, gourds, pulses, fruits, roots and bitter plants—knowledge carried between generations and, through migration, between continents.

Food is often described as part of culture, but that formulation may be too modest. Food is one of the ways culture thinks. It classifies plants, remembers seasons, marks religious time and turns a landscape into a cuisine. A moringa leaf is never only a source of nutrients. A coconut is never only a coconut. A mango can be agricultural history, childhood memory, sacred decoration and an argument over which variety tastes best—all at once.

That may be what made the Fête de Ganesh so compelling. It was not simply a colourful spectacle unfolding temporarily on a Parisian street, but a living system of memory and meaning. In the coconuts, neem, jasmine, mangoes and astonishing variety of gourds, an entire botanical culture moved through the city alongside the gods.

When I say “stay food curious,” this is part of what I mean. Curiosity about food need not stop at taste or technique; sometimes an ingredient is an entry point into history, migration and belief.

Sources and further reading

French Ministry of Culture, “Le défilé du dieu Ganesh à Paris,” Inventaire national du patrimoine culturel immatériel.
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/thematiques/patrimoine-culturel-immateriel/le-patrimoine-culturel-immateriel/l-inventaire-national-du-patrimoine-culturel-immateriel?page2=1

Government of Puducherry, “History,” Puducherry District.
https://puducherry-dt.gov.in/history/

Gaëlle Dequirez, “Tamouls sri lankais : le Little Jaffna de La Chapelle,” Hommes & Migrations, no. 1268–1269, 2007.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/homig_1142-852x_2007_num_1268_1_4631

Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, “India–France Bilateral Relations,” including estimates of the Indian diaspora in France.
https://www.mea.gov.in/Portal/ForeignRelation/India-France-Bilateral-Brief.pdf

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “What Is Agrobiodiversity?”
https://www.fao.org/4/y5609e/y5609e02.htm

Emily Warschefsky and Eric J. B. von Wettberg, “Population Genomic Analysis of Mango (Mangifera indica) Suggests a Complex History of Domestication,” New Phytologist, vol. 222, no. 4, 2019, pp. 2023–2037.
https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.15731

“Pourquoi les hindouistes cassent la noix de coco à La Chapelle, Paris?”, Île du Monde, 6 November 2014.
https://iledumonde.org/pourquoi-les-hindouistes-cassent-la-noix-de-coco-a-la-chapelle-paris/

“Paris : la fête de Ganesh attend 50 000 personnes dimanche,” Le Parisien, 30 August 2019.
https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-la-fete-de-ganesh-attend-50-000-personnes-dimanche-30-08-2019-8142219.php