📷 Navaneethpp · [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
Deities
Beni
Tribal Deity
Tribal Deity
This entry is deliberately short of claims, because the corpus does not yet support more. What is currently recorded is a name — **Beni** — and a state, Madhya Pradesh, under a "tribal deity" heading. No district, no community, no shrine, no festival, no text.
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
This entry is deliberately short of claims, because the corpus does not yet support more. What is currently recorded is a name — Beni — and a state, Madhya Pradesh, under a "tribal deity" heading. No district, no community, no shrine, no festival, no text. That is not enough to write a deity entry honestly, and filling the space with plausible-sounding detail would be worse than leaving it empty. A reader should treat this page as a question that has been asked, not as a deity that has been described.
The best-supported reading, offered as a hypothesis and not as a finding, is that a name of this shape belongs to the class of village, clan and ancestral deities of the central Indian tribal belt — the beings that communities of Madhya Pradesh's plateau, hill and forest regions set up for a lineage or a hamlet, and to whom the practical questions are put: rain, crop, health, the settling of a quarrel, the safe conduct of a journey. That is a category, not an identification. Madhya Pradesh holds many communities with distinct pantheons — Bhil, Baiga, Sahariya, Gond, Kol, Bhilala and others — and a deity name may be shared across several of them while meaning a different being in each. The name alone does not tell a guardian which of these is meant, or even whether the being is a deity at all rather than an ancestor, a spirit of a place, or a particular local saint.
Until someone answers that, the correct handling is: keep the name, keep the state, and do not let this record accumulate invented attributes. What would resolve it is not more desk research. It is one of the following — a district gazetteer entry; a community's own account, in the original language, from a named contributor; a photograph and description of the shrine with its material form, since aniconic and pot-shrine traditions are common in this region and a photograph settles the question instantly; or a name variant that would let the entry be matched against an existing monograph.
