Annapūrṇā — the food-giving goddess of the Andhra coast
This entry is filed for an Annapūrṇā shrine in the Visakhapatnam area of coastal Andhra Pradesh. It has to be written as a gap entry because the shrine has not been identified to a standard published source, and the corpus frontmatter does not supply enough to identify it: it gives a twentieth-century establishment, no village or mandapam name, no founding legend and no priestly lineage. The frontmatter's attribution of the shrine to "Vedic-Ancient (Yamuna mythology)" is a non sequitur — Yamuna is a river goddess of north India and has no connection to an Andhra Annapūrṇā temple — and it should be struck.
What can honestly be said is about the goddess, which is the more useful half of this entry. Annapūrṇā is the Sanskrit form of a deity whose central promise is that she is never empty: she is invoked before a meal is cooked, and the adaikkalu — a small portion set aside and distributed, or offered to her image — is the corresponding act. In Telugu households the practice survives in a modest domestic form: a niche or a stone outside or just inside the house, an oil lamp lit on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a share of the day's food set aside. In temple form the same goddess is approached through the temple annakūṭam, the feeding hall, where a daily or periodic anna-daana is served. The Kālidāsa/Durga Saptashatī connection — Annapūrakṣa feeding the disguised Viṣṇu — is the classical precedent, as in the Tamil case, though the Telugu cult has its own independent idiom which no one has written down for this entry.
The name of the Visakhapatnam shrine, its āgama affiliation, and its relation to the coastal Telugu temple organisation are all open questions. A guardian should also ask whether the local deity is Annapūrṇā at all, or one of the numerous local pīṭha or household goddesses of the region — Pōsa/Polasa, Puttūra, or the coastal ḍādevī forms — who are often identified with Annapūrṇā in popular speech.
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