Khodiyar Mata

Khodiyar Mata

The mother of the herds

Khodiyar Mata is a pastoral goddess of Saurashtra, in Gujarat, worshipped by the herding and farming communities of the region. Her title and her geography belong together: Saurashtra is the peninsula of cattle, and a goddess of this region who is a mother of herds is making a claim about the livelihood of the people who live there.

She is worshipped by the Maldharis and the Vadhias and the settled farming communities of the region, and the relationship is pastoral in the ordinary sense: the herds are the family's capital and the goddess's protection is sought over them. Offerings recorded for her include milk and ghee — the products of the herd itself, offered back to the deity who is credited with the herd. This is a closed loop of economy and devotion, and it is characteristic of the whole class of pastoral deities across India.

The wider Saurashtrian goddess landscape includes several powerful mother-figures — Amba, the Hinglaj Mata of the Banni plateau, Vahanvati and Māriyā among them — and Khodiyar Mata sits inside that set rather than outside it. Saurashtra is remarkable for the density and the independence of its mother-goddesses, many with their own major temples and their own distinct identities, and a page that reduced her to a "pastoral goddess, protector of cattle" has missed the thing that makes the region interesting.

She is a tridaśī temple goddess in the Śākta pattern of western India, and the shrines of this class have a recognisable architecture: the goddess in the centre, and the Navadurgā or the Navagraha set around her on the same platform, so that the mother is surrounded by her retinue. Where a Khodiyar Mata shrine is documented with subsidiary images of that kind, that is a strong indicator of the temple's order and should be recorded rather than left out.

There is a further element to note and to treat carefully. Saurashtrian goddess shrines have historically been served by non-Brahmin priests, and some have had Muslim or Dalit ritual officers attached to them in arrangements peculiar to the region. In several cases the "Muslim" name — a Mīrābā or a Sayyid — is a hereditary office title rather than a claim about the practitioner's religion. This is a real and well-documented feature of the region and it should be described precisely if it applies to this shrine, rather than left vague.

Finally, the record for this entry. It previously carried a fourteen-line stub with the same temple-record boilerplate found across this batch, and its sources were "Local tradition" and "Temple records" — not citations. No shrine has been identified: "Saurashtra" is a region of some thirty thousand square kilometres with a great many goddess temples, and Khodiyar Mata is worshipped in more than one place.

Sources and what is still unverified

• "Local tradition" and "Temple records" are not citations, and no shrine or taluk is named. The entry cannot be checked against anything as it stands.
• The priestly arrangements described above are the general Saurashtrian pattern and must be verified for a specific Khodiyar Mata temple before being published about one.
• The tridaśī arrangement and the Navadurgā/Navagraha subsidiary shrines should be recorded from a temple plan or a gazetteer, not assumed from the class.
• The regional comparison — Amba, Hinglaj Mata, Vahanvati — should be expanded into a properly sourced treatment of the Saurashtrian goddess complex, which is one of the more distinctive goddess traditions in India and is currently represented here only by fragments.