Brahmacharini

Brāhmacarīṇī

The second night of Navarātri, and the woman who lived as a vow

Brāhmacarīṇī is the goddess of the second night of the North Indian Navarātri in the popular nine-night sequence — Śailputrī, Brāhmacarīṇī, Caṇḍraghantā, Kuṣmāṇḍā, Skandamātā, Kātyāyanī, Kālarātrī, Mahāgaurī, Durgā. She is shown as a young woman in plain white or grey, seated, with a rosary and a manuscript, in the composure of brahmacarī: the self-possession of one who has made a vow. The description is deliberate. She is not fierce, and nothing in her iconography threatens; her power is the power of the vow kept.

The Brāhmacarīṇī Vrata is a real and still-observed practice in north India. A girl — traditionally unmarried, and sometimes a widow — undertakes to live on milk or curd, or on fruit, for a stated period, often a year, keeping a set number of rules and fasts, and prays for a long life, for the health of her family, or for a husband. The vow is not devotional decoration; it is a discipline with rules about eating, sleeping, speech and the body, and it is administered by women. It is one of the clearest cases in the Navarātri cycle of a ritual that belongs to women only.

Her story, as told, is that she was the daughter of the sage Viśvāmitra and his wife Indumati, and that she married Vāsiṣṭha — who at the time was living as a bull, because of a curse, and whose own cow was famous. Living as the bull's wife, she kept her vow; when the curse lifted and the bull was restored to his form, he died, and she entered his funeral fire. This is the sati story attached to the goddess, and it is a serious thing for a modern reader to hold: the vow and the immolation belong to the same narrative, and the entry should not present the vow as though it were separable from the story that gives it its meaning. The leelā is regional and its variants differ in which sages are involved.

On the nine nights

The nine-day Navarātri with these names is a largely northern development, and the alternative systems are not versions of it. The Bengal Navarātri dedicates its first three nights to Mahālakṣmī, Mahāsarasvatī and Mahākālī; the Karnata and Telugu Navarātri order the days differently again. The Devīsūkta of the Durga Saptashatī does describe the goddess in nine forms, but not in these names, and the corpus frontmatter's "integrated into Navarātri by c. 10th c. CE" is not a claim this entry can support. The corpus frontmatter also misplaces Brāhmacarīṇī inside the Navadurga grouping as though it were a canonical Nava-durgā member.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Durga Saptashatī / Devī Māhātmya — the Devīsūkta on the nine forms, at work level.
• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for the North Indian goddess cycle and the women's vows.
• A study of the Brāhmacarīṇī Vrata and of the regional Navarātri systems — a specific title and author must be supplied by a guardian; none is on file.