Jyeshthaज्येष्ठा

Jyeshtha is misfortune, and she is Lakshmi's elder sister.

Her name is an ordinal, like Shashthi's: jyeṣṭhā means the elder, the first-born. When the ocean was churned, the tradition says, she came out before Lakshmi did — and that priority is the whole of her theology. Bad fortune is not an interruption of good fortune. It is what was there first.

She is also Alakshmi — not-Lakshmi — and in Tamil Mudevi or Moodevi, a word still in ordinary use as an insult.

Her domain is specific and domestic: poverty, quarrelling in a household, sloth, dirt, debt, and the general condition of things going wrong. She is worshipped — genuinely worshipped, with an offering and a formula — so that she will leave, which is the same logic the Nirrti page sets out at length.

And she is the one deity in this encyclopedia with a documented rise and fall. Between roughly the seventh and the eleventh centuries, in the Pallava and early Chola country, Jyeshtha had images in temple niches, her own shrines and her own rites, and a substantial number of those sculptures survive. By the twelfth century the cult had been abandoned. Nobody recorded why.

What is left is a word people still use, a sweeping before Diwali, and a few hundred statues of a heavy, weary woman sitting between her two children in niches that nobody visits.

Older than the churning story. Jyeshtha's roots are in the ritual literature rather than the Puranas. The Baudhayana Grihya Sutra prescribes a rite for her, and she belongs with the class of powers that early Indian ritual addresses in order to send away — the same family as Nirrti and as the bala-grahas the Shashthi page describes.

The churning account. The Puranas — the Linga and Padma among them — give her the origin most people know: at the churning of the ocean, Alakshmi or Jyeshtha emerges before Lakshmi, and is given to the sage Dussaha or assigned to dwell where inauspiciousness is. In some versions she is explicitly produced from the poison, which places her in the same moment as the Halahala that Shiva drinks.

Her husband cannot bear her — his name says so — and complains; the arrangement made is that she will live where quarrelling, filth, laziness and false speech are, and will leave where they are not. That is a rule of conduct expressed as a goddess's address.

The Tamil cult. This is the substantial part, and the least known. From roughly the seventh century Jyeshtha appears as a sculpted deity in Pallava temples, and continues through the early Chola period: seated, heavy, flanked by a bull-headed son and a daughter, with a crow banner. She occupies niches in major temples, which means she was part of the official programme and not a village concession — and inscriptions record endowments for her worship.

And then it ends. By around the twelfth century the images stop being made, existing ones are left in place unworshipped or moved, and Jyeshtha effectively disappears from the living religion of the Tamil country. The reason is not recorded. Suggestions have been made — the rise of the bhakti movements, a changing appetite for an inauspicious deity in the sanctum, absorption into other goddesses — and none is more than a suggestion.

Alakshmi afterwards. What survives is the Diwali practice: the house swept, old and broken things discarded, noise made, and Alakshmi driven out before Lakshmi is invited in. That is performed by tens of millions of households annually and is her largest continuing presence.

And Dhumavati. The seventh Mahavidya — the widow, smoke-coloured, riding a crow-bannered cart, goddess of loss and hunger — occupies the same position in Tantra and, unlike Jyeshtha, still has a living cult at Varanasi. Her page carries her. The two are not related by descent; they are the same idea arrived at twice.

The most unusual body in Indian sculpture, and the reason the surviving images are worth going to see.

Heavy, and old. She is shown seated, with a large and sagging body, pendulous breasts, a fold at the abdomen, and a tired face. Indian sculpture idealises almost without exception; Jyeshtha is the standing counter-example, and the Pallava and Chola sculptors who made her were plainly not working from the same brief as the ones two niches away.

Two children. Flanking her: a son with a bull's head — usually identified as Mandi or Manda — and a daughter. Both stand, small, one to each side.

The crow. Her banner or her emblem, and in some images a crow is carved at her feet. The bird of the inauspicious, of the ancestors, and of the unswept.

The donkey. Her vahana where one is shown, as it is Nirrti's and Kalaratri's. An animal of no status, carrying deities of no welcome.

In her hands. A blue lotus, and often a fan — a domestic implement, as Shitala's winnowing tray and broom are.

Dark. Black or dark-coloured where colour survives.

Where the images are. In niches — at Kanchipuram, Thiruvottiyur, Uthiramerur and a considerable number of Tamil temples — usually now unworshipped, sometimes moved to a corner or a museum, occasionally still in place and unremarked. They are among the least visited significant sculptures in South India.

Not Dhumavati, and not Chamunda. Dhumavati is gaunt; Chamunda is emaciated to the bone. Jyeshtha is heavy. Three different bodies, three different arguments, and the difference is deliberate in each case.

Alakshmi. Not-Lakshmi; the commonest Sanskrit name, and the one used at Diwali.

Mudevi / Moodevi. The Tamil name. It is also a live insult — calling someone mudevi means calling them a bringer of bad luck or, more often, lazy — and the survival of a discontinued goddess as a term of abuse is a genuinely unusual afterlife.

Jyeshtha Devi / Jyeshtha Lakshmi. The forms used in the Tamil inscriptions and in the Jyeshtha Stotra.

Nirrti. The Vedic goddess of dissolution and the south-west, worshipped so that she departs, with the same ritual grammar of inversion. Not the same figure — the Nirrti page argues that the three are the same idea rediscovered rather than a single line of descent.

Dhumavati. The Tantric occupant of the position, and the only one of the three with a living cult. Her page.

Kalaratri and Dhumravarna. Related dark forms in other enumerations; distinct.

Jyeshtha the nakshatra. The eighteenth lunar mansion, whose presiding deity is Indra, and the Tamil and Sanskrit month named from it. The name is shared and the referents are unrelated — a reader encountering Jyeshtha in an almanac is reading about a date, not this goddess.

Not the Jyeshtha of the Saptamatrika lists. A different name in a different set.

Coming first. The churning story, and the whole of her theology in one detail. The gods and asuras churn; the poison comes up, and Shiva drinks it; and among the things that rise before the nectar is Alakshmi, ahead of her sister.

A tradition that wanted to say misfortune was an aberration would have had Lakshmi first. This one put the elder sister ahead, and made the younger one the arrival.

Nobody will take her. In the Puranic accounts she is offered to sages and refused, and is at last given to Dussaha — "unbearable" — who cannot live with her either. He appeals; a settlement is reached; and she is assigned her dwelling: wherever there is quarrelling, filth, laziness, false speech and neglect of the household rites.

That is the most practical piece of theology in this encyclopedia. A goddess of misfortune whose residence is defined by a list of behaviours turns a metaphysical problem into a domestic one — and gives a household something to do about it.

Where she cannot go. The complement is stated in the same passages: she cannot enter a house that is swept, where the household rites are kept, where people do not quarrel, where guests are fed and where speech is true. The Vishvedevas page describes the daily food offering that belongs to the same system.

Diwali. The living version. Before the lamps are lit the house is cleaned out — old things discarded, corners swept, noise made with winnowing fans in some regional practices — and the explanation given is that Alakshmi is being sent out before Lakshmi is invited in. The two sisters cannot occupy the same house.

And the disappearance. Her own last story is one nobody wrote down. Between the eleventh century and the thirteenth, a goddess with temple niches, endowments and a sculptural tradition stopped being worshipped across an entire region, and no text records a decision, a controversy or a reason. The images stayed where they were.

Almost nothing under her own name, and one very large thing under her other one.

Diwali cleaning. The sweeping of the house, the discarding of the old and broken, and in several regions the beating of a winnowing fan or the making of noise at dawn on Narak Chaturdashi — all explained as driving Alakshmi out. Performed in tens of millions of households every year, and almost nobody performing it knows the name of the goddess being expelled.

In the historic Tamil rite. Where Jyeshtha was worshipped, it was before the main deity or at the edge of the temple, with offerings of a kind the sanctum does not receive. The inscriptions record endowments; the procedure is not preserved in detail.

In the Baudhayana rite. The Grihya Sutra's rite, with the pattern the Nirrti page describes: offered outside, at an inauspicious hour, with what is left over.

In Dhumavati's worship. The Mahavidya occupies the position now, and her Varanasi temple is where a goddess of this kind is actually worshipped in India today. Her page.

In the language. Mudevi in Tamil; alakshmi and daridra in the north; and the proverbial association of the crow, the donkey and the unswept corner.

A necessary note. The rites described here are addressed to poverty and misfortune. DharmSetu records them as religious practice and makes no claim about outcomes. Poverty has causes that are economic and structural, and a household's fortunes are not determined by its sweeping. The tradition's own framing — that she lives where there is neglect and quarrelling — has at times been used to imply that the poor have earned their poverty, and that implication is not supported by anything on this page.

She has no temple, and she once had niches — which is a rarer and more interesting situation.

Tamil Nadu's Pallava and Chola temples. Jyeshtha images survive in niches and in temple precincts at Kanchipuram, Thiruvottiyur, Uthiramerur, Thirumalpuram and a number of other sites in the northern Tamil country. Most are no longer worshipped; some have been moved to the edge of the compound or to a storeroom; a few are still in their original niches, unremarked.

Museum collections. The Government Museum, Chennai, and the site museums hold several of the best examples. For anyone who wants to see what this cult actually looked like, that is where to go.

Dhumavati Temple, Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) — not hers, and the nearest living equivalent: the one well-attended temple in India to a goddess of inauspiciousness.

Nirrti's square in the Vastu Purusha Mandala, and the nairritya corner — the same idea in the architecture. The Ashta Dikpala page carries the scheme.

Every Indian house before Diwali, which is where the observance actually happens.

The honest summary is that Jyeshtha is the clearest case in this encyclopedia of a deity whose buildings outlived her worship — the sculptures are there, in place, on major temples, and the cult that put them there has been gone for eight hundred years.

The elder sister came first. Everything about Jyeshtha follows from the ordinal in her name. Hinduism could have made misfortune a failure of good fortune, a punishment, or a demon. It made it the older sibling — present before the good arrived, permanently related to it, and not going anywhere. That is a more adult account of how bad luck works than most religions manage, and it is compressed into a single word.

A body nobody else carved. The Pallava and Chola sculptors idealised everything — and then produced, for this goddess, a heavy, aging, tired woman and put her in a temple niche. Set against the madanikas and the tribhanga on the same wall, she is the tradition looking at a body it otherwise refused to depict. Whatever the cult meant, the sculpture is remarkable and is almost entirely unvisited.

Worship as dismissal, again. She belongs with Nirrti and Dhumavati in the small category this encyclopedia keeps returning to: deities whose entire ritual apparatus exists to produce a correct absence. That Hinduism has three separate historical attempts at this figure — Vedic, Tamil-Puranic and Tantric — suggests the need was persistent and the solutions kept lapsing.

A cult that ended, with no record. This is the page's most unusual content. Almost every deity here either persists or fades invisibly over centuries. Jyeshtha has dated images, dated endowments and a dated stop, and nothing explaining it. It is the best evidence in this encyclopedia that Hindu practice can and does discontinue things — which is worth saying against the common claim that the tradition only accumulates.

And the word that outlived her. In Tamil, mudevi is still said. A goddess abandoned eight hundred years ago survives as a term of abuse for someone who does not get up in the morning — which is, when you look at where the texts assign her to live, almost exactly what she was for.