Bonbibi

Bonbibi

The Lady of the Sundarbans, worshipped on both sides of the water

Bonbibi (বনবিবি, "lady of the forest") is a deity of the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal — the mangrove country of the Bengal coast — venerated by Hindu and Muslim fishing and woodcutting families alike. That shared veneration is the fact that makes Bonbibi worth an entry in its own right, and it is also the reason she resists being described as belonging to one tradition. She is a śakti-form in the Bengali Hindu understanding — a form of Durgā, of the saptamātṛikā family of forest goddesses — and in the Muslim understanding of the same communities she is a jinn or a saint of the marsh who must be respected and propitiated. Devotees perform the same acts at the same shrine: pūjā to her image, the offering of food and fish and sugar, the keeping of a vrata before a journey into the mangroves, and the avoidance of the circumstances in which she is said to be provoked. A form of Sītalā is also claimed in parts of Bengal, since the two are both deities of febrile and marsh-borne illness.

Her domain is precisely the Sundarbans and its people. She is asked for safe passage through the creeks, for the recovery of a person lost in the mangrove, for protection from the bīṣ of the forest, and for the health of the jīva of the fishing families. The bhūta and pret of the delta are within her administration, which is the same order of idea as the bhūtanātha shrines of the Konkan, and the Sundarbans material is a parallel case to them rather than a variant of them.

The specific shrine this entry refers to, and the jātakī of the goddess, are not identified in the corpus frontmatter, which gives only "Sundarbans" and the shrine type. Locating the Bonbibi shrines of the delta, recording the kalat of the deity, and assembling the Bengali oral literature and the jānakī traditions of the marsh deities is a task for a Bengali-speaking regional scholar with fieldwork access, and none of that material is on file here.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Bengali folklore and anthropological literature on the Sundarbans deities — a specific study must be supplied by a guardian; none is on file in this corpus.
• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for the saptamātṛikā and the shared cult context.
• South 24 Parganas District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — to be checked.
• The corpus frontmatter's "unknown" dating is honest, and the frontmatter's verification_status of REVIEWED on a stub body has been lowered here; nothing substantive about this shrine has been verified.