Kol Ther

Kol Ther — a village god of Madhya Pradesh

What the corpus holds, and what it does not

The slug kol-ther and its tradition_name, "Deity of Rohila", are all the corpus holds. The previous body was a machine stub with no description at all. There is no district, no tradition, no image and no source; the entry sits in Madhya Pradesh with "Hindu, Folk" in the tradition field and "Local tradition" in the sources.

This entry therefore does the minimum honest thing and marks it. Madhya Pradesh does contain a large number of village and caste deities — grāmadevatā and kuladevatā forms — many of them named for a kol (a tank or depression holding water) or a ter or tīr (a place, a water-site), which is exactly the kind of name a village deity carries, since the deity of a settlement is very often the deity of its water. Culp's work on the South Indian institution is a comparative frame, not a source about Madhya Pradesh, and should not be cited as though it were.

Two things should be said about the name. The corpus's tradition_name, "Deity of Rohila", appears to be a garbled or machine-generated form and carries no weight. And the deity of a Madhy Pradesh village of this kind will not be found in a Purāṇa or an Āgama: these shrines are documented, where at all, in district gazetteers, in the pamphlets printed for the annual fair, and in the oral tradition of the kul that keeps them.

What a guardian needs to do

This file cannot be written into a real entry by inference. It needs, in order: the district and the village; the deity's name as pronounced locally; whether the shrine is a stone, an antill, a tree or an image; which family or caste serves it; and the month of its jatre. With those five answers the entry can be written. Without them, any paragraph added here would be invention dressed as documentation, and the corpus is better served by a short honest page.

Sources and what is still unverified

Culp's Village Gods of South India is the comparative frame. The Madhya Pradesh district gazetteers are the primary local source and have not been consulted for this entry. Nothing here is verified, and the entry should stay marked until a named local contributor supplies the material above.