Imoinu Ima — Household goddess of the Meitei
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
Imoinu Imā is the goddess of the household and of the rice-granary in the indigenous Meitei tradition (Sanamahi). Where Leimaren is the earth and the ground itself, Imoinu is the stored grain and the household that keeps it — the deity of what a Meitei family holds in store and of the family's continuity across the year. She is honoured in the domestic order of a Meitei home, and her observance is fundamentally a household matter rather than the business of a public temple.
Sanamahi practice distinguishes a sacred corner of the home. In many Meitei households the corner associated with the rice-goddess and the household deities occupies the south-west, while other corners of the house are assigned to other powers; the exact orientation and the assignment of corners differ between households and lineages and are not uniform, so the arrangement should be described as a family practice rather than a single rule. The daily rite of the house opens by invoking the deities and by setting aside a portion of the day's food as phasat, the share that belongs to the unseen powers and is not eaten by the family. Imoinu receives a distinctive share of this. The substance of her cult is the daily offering of rice, cooked and raw, and of zou (rice beer), the drink of ritual, at her corner.
Her principal observance is the Imoinu Iratpa, a household purification and propitiation performed around the end of the Meitei year, in the period of Wakching. In it the family renews the household, sets the year's store right, and asks Imoinu for the year's prosperity. In some families the observance also takes the form of an accounting: the year's grain, livestock and goods are counted and formally presented, so that what the household has is offered rather than merely possessed. This is a living domestic rite, and its details — which foods, how the store is counted, how many days it runs — vary from family to family. It is celebrated in the home, not at a shrine, and describing it as a temple festival would be wrong.
Because Meitei households have been Christian in large numbers since the twentieth century, the observance is practised to very different degrees in different homes, and the rite exists in both its full traditional form and in reduced family versions. It should not be described as extinct, nor should it be presented as if practised uniformly.
This entry is grounded in the indigenous Meitei tradition as described in community material and the Manipur gazetteer tradition, with wider North-East Indian ethnography for context. A human guardian who is a Meitei Sanamahi practitioner, or a scholar writing in Meitei, should supply and check: the sacred corner's orientation and the correct assignment of corners; the precise contents of the daily phasat and the share reserved for Imoinu; the calendar position and procedure of Imoinu Iratpa; and the correct forms of her name in ritual address. The earlier framing of this entry described Imoinu as a goddess of "prosperity, fertility and grain" imported from general Hindu categories and set her in a "Sanamahi corner" as though this were a single standard arrangement; both have been revised toward the specific Meitei household practice. No Sanskritic genealogy is asserted here.
.svg/500px-The_Symbol_of_Sanamahi_(coloured).svg)
