📷 Navaneethpp · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Deities
Mariai Aai
Māriāi Āī — Maharashtrian village-goddess
Māriāi Āī — Maharashtrian village-goddess
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
Māriāī Āī is a village goddess of Maharashtra associated with smallpox, and this entry should say at the outset that she is better documented than most of her peers and that the earlier version of this file still said too much too confidently. The previous revision described her as "the most widely-worshipped village-goddess of Maharashtra". That superlative is unproven and has been removed. She is widely worshipped; whether she is the most widely worshipped is a claim that would need a survey of the state, and nobody has conducted one.
What is solid is her position in the Maharashtrian village pantheon. She belongs to a family of gaṇī or mother-goddesses, matā, who are the powers a village acknowledges in order to live: the village goddess, the cattle goddess, the snake goddess, the goddess of the boundary, the goddess of the well. Their shrines are small, local, and served by non-Brahmin priests from the same communities as the villagers, and the worship is non-vegetarian in the older pattern, with the offerings that follow from that. The non-Brahmin character of the priesthood is not a defect of the shrine. It is the shrine's social form, and it is the reason these deities barely appear in the Brahminical literature and are so thinly served by the standard reference works.
Maharashtra has a further layer that is worth flagging because it changes the category. In several districts Māriāī Āī is worshipped in close conjunction with Dhanvantari — the Śiva-side physician as against the Vaiṣṇava one — and there are shrines where the two are treated as a pair for the protection of the village's health. Where that is the case, Māriāī is not only a disease goddess but the source of medicine, and an entry that files her only under "folk goddess" loses the point.
The comparison with Mariamman of Tamil Nadu is worth making carefully and not overstating. The two are parallel institutions: a village mother of disease, marked face, outside the Brahminical order, given the illness rather than asked to remove it. They are not the same deity, there is no evidence of derivation either way, and the two traditions have had essentially no contact. A corpus that renders them as the same entry with a regional adjective has lost the most interesting fact, which is that two unrelated societies arrived at the same solution independently.
The Maharashtra district gazetteers, with the volume for whichever district the shrine turns out to be in, are the anchor. A named study of the Marathi village-goddess cult and of Dhanvantari worship is the next thing to add. The Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) will have something, and will probably understate the non-Brahminical practice. Still unverified: the superlative removed, the identification of the shrine behind this entry — the frontmatter says "pan-state" and gives a state centroid, which is not a location — the festival calendar, the iconography, and the extent of the Dhanvantari pairing. Note also that the previous revision misspelled the name. Left .
