Maisamma

Maisamma

The cow-lady of the Telangana hamlet

Maisamma — also written Meesamma, Maisama — is a cattle-protecting goddess worshipped in Telangana, and this entry should begin by admitting how little is settled about her. The published literature the editor can point to is thin, the sources carried by earlier revisions of this file were the single placeholder "Local tradition", and the shrine at which this record is anchored is not identified beyond the state. What can be said is the shape of the cult, because that shape is shared and well described for the region.

Maisamma's domain is livestock. A household that has lost animals, or that is about to buy a pair, or that keeps buffaloes for the first time, will go to her. She is asked for fertility of the herd, for the animals' health, and — in a district where livestock is a large part of a family's capital — for the herd's survival through drought and disease. Offerings in this family are household offerings: milk, curd, coconut, turmeric, jaggery, a lamp, and in some places a goat or a chicken. The worship is generally entrusted to a woman of the family, which is unusual beside the male priesthoods of the great temples and is a real feature of this kind of deity rather than an omission.

The thing to understand is that Maisamma is not a goddess "besides" the others. She belongs to a dense cluster of village goddesses in Telangana — Peddamma, Pochamma, Yerramma and others — who are named separately, worshipped separately, and frequently appear together in the same festival. The relationship between them is not settled: in some accounts they are sisters; in others they are competing goddesses attached to rival lineages, of whom a village may recognise several; in modern urban practice they are increasingly merged into a single goddess to fit the large public festivals. Those are three different worlds and this entry holds them apart.

One caution about method. The name appears in a long list of Telangana and Andhra village goddesses, and a database that generates a separate god for every spelling ends up with a pantheon of near-duplicates and no record of the thing that actually matters — which god this village owes, and why this one.

Sources and what is still unverified

Rangareddy District Gazetteer, and the district gazetteers of the old Hyderabad state, are the first things to consult. A guardian should add a named study of Telangana village deities; the older general works on South Indian village gods — Culp's Village Gods of South India is the obvious place to look for the method — are the right model for how this should be written. Still unverified: the spelling, the identity of the shrine behind this entry, the local festival calendar, the relationship to Peddamma and Pochamma, and who performs the rite. Left , and flagged for a Telangana reader.