Ravalnath

Ravalnath

The horseman at the edge of the Konkan village

Ravalnath is one of the most widely worshipped village gods of the Konkan coast, in Goa, in the southern part of Maharashtra across the border, in Karnataka to the north and, in related forms, further down the coast. He is depicted as a mounted warrior — on horseback, armed, and often with a horse's head, or with a sword — and that image is the theology. A horseman is a power of the road, of the border, of the field being crossed and the boundary being crossed at the same time. The Konkan is a narrow strip between the sea and the Western Ghats, and everything that moves through it moves through a defended margin.

He belongs to the Saptakoti complex, the grouping of the principal village goddesses and gods of the Konkan, and he is closely bound up with Khandoba, and with Mhalsa who is Khandoba's consort. The previous revision of this file called Ravalnath "akin to" Khandoba. That is too weak and also too strong: in the commonest account they are the same god under different names in different places — the deity is worshipped as Khandoba in one shrine, as Ravalnath in another, sometimes in a compound shrine. In other accounts they are two gods with a shared following. A corpus should not decide this, and should say that the identification is local and contested. The Mhalsa entry carries the same problem from the other side.

Worship is village worship in the sense that Robert Culp's account of village gods describes: the shrine is a local establishment, the priesthood is drawn from the local non-Brahmin community, the offerings are the village offerings rather than the temple offerings, and the festival is a village festival whose date is set locally rather than by a pan-Indian calendar. The deity is asked for the ordinary things — protection, cattle, fertility, the settlement of a dispute, and in a region of estate and forest economy, permission to work someone else's land without harm.

There is also a historical layer worth naming. Konkani Hindu shrines were suppressed, converted and relocated during the Portuguese period, and many were restructured or re-founded in the twentieth century in the course of the return of temple properties to religious trusts. A shrine's tradition in this region is therefore often continuous while its building is not, and a corpus that dates a shrine from its foundation story is systematically wrong here.

Finally, the standard caution for this part of the file: there is a Ravalnath in almost every Konkan village, and the coordinate in this entry's frontmatter is a Goa level centroid rather than a shrine. A name in this corpus is a beginning, not an identification.

Sources and what is still unverified

Goa State Gazetteer is the anchor. A study of Saptakoti and Khandoba worship in the Konkan is the next requirement, and A. K. Ramanujan's work on the language of religious naming is the model for how the names should be discussed — the relationship between Ravalnath, Khandoba and Saptakoti Koti is largely a question about naming. The previous revision cited a work called "Tribes and Castes of Goa", a title of uncertain identification, which has been dropped. Still unverified: the identification of any particular shrine, the Ravalnath-Khandoba relation at any specific site, the festival calendar, the twentieth-century restructuring, and the coordinates. Left .