Mhalsa (Konkan form)

Mhalsa of the Konkan

A goddess of the seven crores, and a shrine with a history of hiding

Mhalsa of Mardol, in North Goa, is one of the great goddesses of the Konkan, and she sits inside a complex that a reader has to hold in two hands at once. The Konkani Saptakoti complex is a set of seven or eight principal village goddesses of the region, with Khandoba and Ravalnath among the most important. Mhalsa is understood as the consort of Khandoba — who is, in the commonest local identification, Ravalnath. That is a close relationship between a goddess, a god and a place-name, and the corpus holds separate pages for all of them for good reason: they are related, they are not identical, and an entry that merges them destroys more than it explains.

The image at Mardol is of the goddess as a pair, and the temple is a good example of Konkani temple form under the Portuguese period — a regional architecture that continued to be built when the same deity was being suppressed, and which is therefore one of the more interesting records of what survived. The Portuguese relationship to Hindu shrines on this coast involved demolition and conversion, and the survival of Konkani goddess cults is a story that has to be told with care and from local memory rather than from either triumphal or annihilatory summary.

On that point, this entry has to correct its own previous revision, which stated flatly that the deity "was smuggled from her original location to escape Portuguese iconoclasm". That is a specific historical claim and it is not established. Stories of idols concealed, hidden, or carried away from a threatened site are found all over the Konkan and the Western Ghats, and they are the kind of story that families tell about their own foundation. It may well be true here. It may also be true of a different shrine in a different village. The honest form is: the local tradition relates a hiding, the details differ, and a guardian with access to the temple's own account and to the district gazetteer should record what it actually says.

A more general caution applies to this whole family. Goa's Hindu shrines were restructured, relocated and re-founded around the middle of the twentieth century, in the course of the land reforms and the return of properties to religious trusts. The consequence is that a great many Konkani shrines have a documented twentieth-century setting and a much older claimed antecedent. A corpus that dates a shrine by its foundation myth is systematically wrong here, in a way it is not elsewhere.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Goa State Gazetteer is the anchor. A study of Konkani Saptakoti and Khandoba worship is the next requirement, and A. K. Ramanujan's work on the language of religious naming in this region is the place to look for how the names actually function. Note that the previous revision cited a work called "Tribes and Castes of Goa", a title of uncertain identification which has been dropped. Still unverified: the hiding tradition and its details, the date of the present temple, the identification of the image, and the twentieth-century restructuring. Left .