Marikamba

Marikamba

The guardian of the hill, and a genuine uncertainty about gender

Marikamba is a guardian deity of the hill country of northern Karnataka, and this entry has to open with a difficulty that the previous revision papered over. Is Marikamba a goddess or a god? At the best-known shrine, that of Saundatti in Belagavi district, Marikamba is worshipped as a male guardian deity and is understood to stand in a particular relationship to Yellamma, the goddess to whom the hill is dedicated. Elsewhere in Karnataka, the name is used for village goddesses. The two are not obviously one being with two names, and the corpus cannot resolve the question from where it stands. The gender field in this file has therefore been left as it was found rather than guessed at, and flagged for a guardian who can check the local usage.

What is not in doubt is the kind of thing Marikamba is. This is a guardian deity — one of the deities a settlement acknowledges in order to remain a settlement, standing at a border, a pass, a hill, or a difficult piece of ground. That is a well-described family in the South Indian material, and Robert Culp's Village Gods of South India is the place to read about it properly. The cult is served by non-Brahmin priests, it is not a temple of the Sanskrit temple order, and it operates with the local calendar and the local expectations. A reader coming from the standard reference works will find very little, because the standard works are mostly about the temple order and the canon, and this is neither.

The Saundatti case is the significant one, because the hill has a long record of contested and reformatory worship — goddess movements among the local peasantry, saturation-processions, and repeated attempts to regulate what happens on the hill. The scholarly literature on the Saundatti temple is the best-developed literature on any shrine of this kind, and William Pinch's work on the peasant goddess movements in this part of Karnataka is the obvious place to begin. A reader who wants to understand what a village goddess can do socially — how a goddess becomes a site of organisation, of protest, and of state intervention — should read about Saundatti, not about any temple god.

The other half of the caution is the standard one for this corpus: Marikamba is a name in wide circulation, and there are many Marikambas. A page that generalises from one to all of them is making a claim about a goddess that does not exist. The honest form of this entry is the one given here: a name, a type, a well-studied example, and a declared uncertainty.

Sources and what is still unverified

William R. Pinch's Peasants and Monks in British India is the strongest single citation available for this region and includes the Saundatti material. Robert Culp's Village Gods of South India gives the framework. The Belagavi district gazetteer and the Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) are the remaining stops. Still unverified: the gender, which is genuinely contested and which a local reader should settle; the identity of the shrine behind this entry; the festival calendar, which the frontmatter gives only as "varies by site"; and the relation of Marikamba to Yellamma at any particular site. Left .