Jagaddhatri

Jagaddhātrī — the sustainer of the world

A name that means what it says

Jagaddhātrī, "she who holds up the world", is a name of Durgā and one of the forms in which she is worshipped in Bengal. She is described as standing on a lion, four-armed, holding a book and a pen in the upper hands — the emblems of knowledge, which is the point of her name rather than an incidental attribute. Where Durgā as Mahiṣāsuramardinī destroys, Jagaddhātrī sustains; the corpus's assignment of her the function "destroyer" is a copy-paste from a neighbouring record and should be struck.

The form is not exclusive to Bengal, but it is particularly characteristic of the Bengali Śākta tradition, where the major centres are the kālī-centred shrines of Kolkata and, to the south, the Chandannagar and Chandrakona temples. The Vaishnava and Śākta communities of the region hold her in common devotion, and the annual Jagaddhātrī Puja is performed on the day of Sridevi Ashtami, the eighth day of the bright fortnight of the lunar month of Ashwin, and again at Kali Puja in Ashwin. At Kolkata's temples the observance includes the laying of lamps across the river and the reading of the Mahābhārata — the Pāṇḍava-līlā recitation and kīrtan over the days of the puja are the substance of the festival rather than its decoration.

The Bengali Śākta tradition is a scholarly field with its own textual and institutional history, and a description of Jagaddhātrī that omitted the fact that her cult is served by specific families of priests would misrepresent it.

Sources and what is still unverified

Majumdar's Encyclopaedia of Hindu Deities for the form and its iconography; the Purāṇic Devī sections in general; and — for the Bengali practice — a named study of Bengali goddess cults, which this record does not yet have and which a guardian should supply.

Outstanding: which temple texts and which manuscript of the Devī Purāṇa the Chandannagar and Kolkata shrines follow; the founding chronology of the Chandannagar shrine; the present-day custodians of each puja; and the correction of the frontmatter's "destroyer" function field.