Devi

Adi Shakti — the first power, she without whom nothing stirs. She is Jagadamba, mother of the worlds; Bhavani and Ambe and Durga; Mata Rani of the hills, whose bulawa, her own call, a pilgrim waits for before setting out. Her book is the Devi Mahatmya, the seven hundred verses that stand as chapters eighty-one to ninety-three of the Markandeya Purana and are recited as the Durga Saptashati through the nine nights of Navaratri. Its thirteen chapters fall into three charitas, and at the head of each the reciter invokes a presiding form — Mahakali over the first, Mahalakshmi over the middle, Mahasaraswati over the last; dissolution, sustenance and creation; tamas, rajas and sattva. They are three faces of one Mother and not three Mothers, and that is the whole teaching of the text: the many goddesses of Bharat are her many names. The Shakti Peethas — the seats where the body of Sati came to earth — are the crown of her worship, and they keep their own reckonings, their own yatra and their own page here. This tradition gathers the other great homes of the Devi, and no temple counted among the Peethas of the canonical lists is named again on this one: what remains is not the smaller company but the wider — the Mother's land, which the Peethas crown and can never enclose.

What the Saptashati invokes, her shrines make visible. In a limestone cave of the Trikuta hills above Katra there is no image at all: on a rock base some five and a half feet high stand three self-manifest pindis — whitish Mahasaraswati on the left for sattva and creation, the yellowish-red Mahalakshmi in the middle for rajas and sustenance, black Mahakali on the right for tamas and dissolution — and the Mother of that cave is Shri Mata Vaishno Devi, to whom lakhs upon lakhs climb the thirteen kilometres from Katra each year, saying the yatra begins only with her call. Far to the south-east, at Ratanpur in Chhattisgarh — Ratnapura, the city of jewels, seat of the Kalachuris of Dakshina Kosala — Mahamaya is Kosaleshwari, sovereign of that land: Mahalakshmi seated below in her sanctum and Mahasaraswati above and to her right, so that wealth and wisdom are given in a single darshan, with Mahakali honoured beside them in the older temple. One cave and one sanctum, and the same three.

Her homes stand in every direction of Bharat. Kashi is Shiva's city, but its nourishment is hers: Annapurna keeps her kitchen a few steps from Vishwanath in the old lanes, and the city's ancient assurance is that within its bounds nobody goes hungry — a promise its annakshetra makes good every day. In Bengal she is Bhavatarini, she who carries her children across the ocean of existence, worshipped in Rani Rashmoni's nine-spired temple at Dakshineswar on the Hooghly, where Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa kept her service some thirty years. In the deep south she is sovereign and not consort: at Madurai the pilgrim enters Meenakshi's shrine before Sundareswarar's, and a Tamil saying names the three great goddesses in one breath — Kanchi Kamakshi, Madurai Meenakshi, Kashi Visalakshi. In the Kangra hills Chamunda sits above the Baner and makes no Peetha claim at all, holding instead a living place in the Devi-bhoomi of that valley and a station on the Nau Devi circuit families from across the north walk together; and in Garhwal, on a bare summit above the Mussoorie road, Surkanda Devi is honoured simply as the Siddhapeeth of those hills, where the head of the Mother is said to have come to rest. These are the homes this tradition is being built out towards, one researched entry at a time.

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