Karṇī Mātā of Deshnoke

Karni Mata of Deshnoke

A regional goddess, and two rival accounts of the rats

This entry and karni-mata describe the same goddess and the same shrine at Deshnoke in Bikaner district, Rajasthan. They carry two different accounts of how the rats came to be, and this entry does not resolve them. A guardian should decide whether the two are merged and which local version is authoritative, or whether both are kept as variant traditions. Until that decision is taken, both accounts are recorded here and neither is presented as the true one.

The account in the other entry is that Karni Mata was a woman of spiritual power whose brother Kusha was murdered and who prayed him back to life, and that he returned as a rat — so the rats at the shrine are the embodiment of her brother.

The account recorded here is different. In this version Karni Mata is a woman of the Charan community who attained divine status, and the rats are her own kin — the sons and grandsons of her line, returned in rat form. This version attaches to the story an episode in which she confronts Yama, the god of death, over the fate of her clan, and the rats are the form her line takes rather than dying. The shrine's own sthala-puranam is the authority on which of these the Deshnoke keepers tell, and it has not been consulted for this entry. The two accounts should be treated as two local traditions, not as one story told two ways.

What both versions agree on is the practice. The rats at the shrine are not vermin and are not killed; they are fed by devotees, and the sharing of food with them is the act of devotion itself. The shrine at Deshnoke is a low, circular plastered structure rather than a tall classical temple, and it holds a very large number of rats. The often-repeated figure of "25,000 rats" appears in popular accounts but no count from the temple has been cited here, and the number varies; it should be given only from a count. A white rat is held to be particularly auspicious. Pilgrims also eat food that the rats have touched, and the temple's marble work and its sena (music) are gifts of the Maharajas of Bikaner, which is a real institutional relationship between the shrine and the Bikaner state.

The two features of this shrine that an honest entry must record are the social arrangements. The upkeep of the shrine has historically been the work of families from the Mahak (Scheduled Caste) community, and the management of the temple has historically been vested in particular hereditary families. The relationship between the managing trustees, the Devadasi singers attached to the shrine, and the cleaning communities has been the subject of public dispute, litigation, and reform. None of it is settled, and a summary of this shrine that omits it would misrepresent it — as would one that asserted a single current arrangement.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is grounded in the Rajasthani folk-deity tradition, in the shrine's own sthala-puranam and devasthanam record, and in the Bikaner district gazetteer. A human guardian from the Deshnoke or Bikaner tradition should supply and check: which of the two accounts of the rats the shrine actually holds; the correct kinship of Karni Mata to the rats as locally understood; the sthala-puranam narrative; the current management arrangement and the position of the cleaning communities; and the chronology of the goddess. The specific dates in earlier versions of this entry — "1387–1538" — have no cited source and should be treated as traditional or dropped. The source previously listed for this entry, a purported 1973 book on Shakti Pithas by D. C. Sircar, could not be verified and has been replaced. The framing of this goddess as part of a "Shakta landscape" in the earlier body has been removed as a doctrinal imposition on a regional saint-shrine.