Śītalā Devi — the cool goddess

Śītalā Devī

The cool mother, and the goddess of smallpox

Śītalā (Sitala, Sheetala) — "the cool one" — is a goddess of eastern and northern India, most densely worshipped in Bengal, Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Nepal and Rajasthan, and she is the deity of smallpox, of fever, and of the cooling that both relieve. Her imagery is unusually domestic: she carries a broom and a water pot, and is shown riding a lion; the broom and the pot are the two implements of her office, since the goddess both cleanses a house of the disease and cools it. She is identified in the Bengali and Bihari literatures as a form of Durgā, and the śitalā of the household is a śakti with a real cult rather than a metaphor.

The observances are the best-documented part of the tradition. The Śītalā Vrata — performed especially by women seeking children — is kept on the fridays and on the eighth day of the bright fortnight of the month of Jyēṣṭha, when the fast is closed with a pāyasa of rice and milk; in Bengal the great Śītalā Pūjā is held on the last Friday of Jyēṣṭha and in the Bengal śyāmā calendar is associated with the gathering of many women at one shrine for a single communal bhog. The goddess's "hand", or the cloth offered to her, is kept and later immersed; the neem leaf and the kohl of the shrine are used medicinally in the same rite, which is why the ritual and the household pharmacopoeia are inseparable here.

Śītalā has a second, thoroughly documented history in the twentieth century. During the smallpox eradication campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, vaccination was promoted through the existing festivals — the pūjā was used as a public-health platform, and health workers spoke in the goddess's terms. This is one of the clearest cases in India of a deity's authority being used to carry a state health programme, and the anthropological and public-health literature on it is substantial. It should be reported as a documented campaign, not as an example of superstition overcome.

Her origin stories vary — a king's child, a woman transformed by devotion to a teacher named Sadāśiva, a Siddha — and the variants should be preserved rather than merged.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses — for Śītalā in the eastern Indian context, work level.
• Bengali and Maithili devotional literature on the Śītalā vrata — work level.
• The public-health literature on smallpox eradication and śitalā pūjā in India — real and important; a specific title and author must be supplied by a guardian.
• Nadia / Murshidabad District Gazetteers (Government of India gazetteer series).
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "Varies" dating, and every festival date listed.