Shitalaशीतला

Shitala — śītalā, the cool one — is the goddess of smallpox, and by extension of the eruptive fevers of the hot season.

The name is the first thing to understand about her. Smallpox is a burning disease. The goddess of it is called coolness, and every element of her worship is cold: cold water poured over her image, food cooked the day before and eaten cold, no fire lit in the house, neem leaves laid on the bed, no oil, no spice, no heat. The naming is propitiatory — you address the fever as coolness because you want it to become coolness — and it is also a description of the treatment that was actually available.

The second thing is the theology, which is unlike almost anything else in this encyclopedia. Shitala does not send the disease as a punishment in the ordinary sense. In the village understanding, the eruption on the body is the goddess herself, present. A household with a sick child says the mother has come. The pustules are called her grace, her pearls, her flowers. The sick person is not treated as afflicted but as temporarily inhabited by a deity, and is handled accordingly — kept cool, kept quiet, not given medicine that would offend, and worshipped in place.

And the third thing is that smallpox no longer exists. It was eradicated by vaccination; the last case in India was in 1975, and the World Health Organization certified global eradication in 1980. Shitala's worship continues, and what happened to a goddess whose disease was taken away is one of the more interesting things in modern Indian religion.

A village goddess, Sanskritised late. Shitala belongs to the grama devata stratum — the goddesses of the village boundary, worshipped in the open, often without brahmin priests, receiving offerings of a kind the Sanskritic tradition does not make. Her shrines are characteristically outside the settlement, under a neem tree, and often consist of a stone or a few stones rather than an image.

The Sanskrit layer is thin and identifiable. The Shitala Ashtaka, an eight-verse hymn transmitted as part of the Skanda Purana and attributed to Shiva's own speech, gives her a place in the Puranic scheme and identifies her with Parvati. The Picchila Tantra and some later Tantric compendia include her. These texts do not create the cult; they accommodate it.

The Bengali literature. In eastern India she is the subject of a full mangal kavya cycle — the Shitala Mangal, of which Manikram Ganguli's eighteenth-century version is the best known. The mangal kavya genre is precisely the literature of goddesses being brought from the village into the written tradition, and Shitala's place in it is characteristic.

The southern counterpart. Mariamman in the Tamil country, Marayamma in Karnataka and related goddesses across the Deccan occupy the same position — the goddess of pox and fever, worshipped at the village edge, with the same cooling observances. They are not the same deity and the cults are independent, but the structure is identical and the comparison is standard in the scholarship.

Variolation and the goddess. This is the most historically consequential part of her record and is not well known. Before Jennerian vaccination reached India, variolation — inoculation with material from a mild case, tikā — was practised in Bengal and elsewhere by specialists called tikādārs, and the procedure was framed as a rite of Shitala: the inoculator worshipped the goddess, imposed the cooling regimen, and inoculated. The practice was reported at length by European observers in the eighteenth century, notably by J. Z. Holwell in 1767. The East India Company banned variolation in Bengal in 1804 in favour of vaccination.

What this means is that for a long period the goddess's priests were also the practitioners of the only effective preventive measure then available in India, and that the ritual and the medical procedure were a single act. Any account that treats Shitala worship as simply an alternative to medicine has the history backwards.

On a donkey. She rides a gardabha, an ass — an animal of no status whatever, and one of the surest signs of a deity who belongs to the village rather than the temple. In some Bengali images the donkey is replaced by a lotus, which marks a Sanskritising image.

The four objects. Her hands hold:

• a short broom (mārjanī) — for sweeping, and read as sweeping away impurity or as scattering the disease;
• a winnowing fan (śūrpa) — for separating grain from chaff, and read as separating the afflicted from the rest, or as fanning coolness;
• a pot of cool water (kalaśa) — the water of the disease, and the water of its abatement;
• a branch of neem (nimba) — the tree that is hers, whose leaves are laid on the patient's bed and hung at the door.

Every one of these is an object from an ordinary house. She carries no weapon.

Naked, or in red. Frequently shown naked or scantily clad, red or pale-skinned, sometimes with the marks of the disease on her body.

Aniconic forms. Very commonly there is no image at all — a rough stone, a group of stones, a mound under a neem tree, smeared with vermilion. This is her most authentic form and is what most Shitala shrines actually contain.

Jvarasura. In Bengal she is attended by Jvarasura, the fever demon, depicted as a dark three-legged, three-headed figure, and by a group of associated goddesses of other diseases — Raktavati, Oladevi for cholera, and others. The arrangement is a pantheon of illness, organised by complaint, and it is one of the more systematic things in Indian folk religion.

Shitala Mata — the standard North Indian form.

Shitala / Shitola of Bengal — with Jvarasura and the disease-goddess retinue, and the mangal kavya literature.

The seven sisters. In many regions she is one of a group — commonly seven — of sister goddesses, each with a complaint: measles, chickenpox, cholera, fever. Local names vary widely and the sets do not agree with one another, which is normal for this stratum of religion.

Mariamman, Yellamma/Renuka, Marayamma, Pochamma (Telangana) and Kaliamma — the southern and Deccan goddesses of the same office. Independent cults, parallel structure.

Olabibi / Ola Chandi. In Bengal, the cholera goddess is worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims, as Olabibi among Muslims and Oladevi among Hindus, at the same shrines in some places. Disease cuts across religion and the cults followed.

Identification with Parvati and Durga. The Shitala Ashtaka makes it; regional traditions extend it; and at the popular level she is often simply Mata, without further specification. The identification is a later accommodation, not the origin.

Sheetala of Gurugram. The large temple at Gurugram identifies the goddess with Kripi, wife of Dronacharya — a local identification with no wider textual basis, and a good example of how a village goddess acquires a Sanskritic biography when her shrine becomes prosperous.

The Shitala Ashtaka's account. Shiva describes the goddess as having arisen carrying a winnowing fan of urad pulse and cold water, and appoints her to the office. The hymn is short, is recited during outbreaks, and identifies her with Parvati.

The Bengali mangal narrative. In the Shitala Mangal the goddess seeks recognition, is refused by a king or a merchant, sends the disease upon his household or his kingdom, and is at length recognised and given worship. This is the standard mangal kavya plot and is told of Manasa and Chandi as well. What the plot encodes is transparent: a goddess demanding entry into a religious establishment that will not admit her, and getting it by force. It is the story of the cult's own history told as narrative.

Jvarasura's origin. In some accounts the fever demon is produced from Shiva's sweat or anger and given to Shitala as an attendant, which places him within the Shaiva scheme and subordinates him to her.

"The mother has come." Not a story but a formula, and the most important sentence in her cult. When a household reported the disease, they did not say a child was ill; they said the goddess had arrived. The consequences were practical: the room was kept cool and dark, the patient was fanned with neem, no fire was lit, no meat or spice was cooked, visitors were restricted, and the patient was worshipped. Modern historians of medicine have noted that this regimen — cooling, isolation, neem, restricted contact — is, whatever its theological basis, a reasonable nursing protocol for a disease with no treatment, and that the restriction on visitors amounted to a form of quarantine.

The tikadar's rite. The inoculator arrived, worshipped the goddess, imposed the regimen, and made the inoculation. The rite and the procedure were not two things.

Basoda / Shitala Ashtami. Her principal observance, on the eighth day after Holi in most of North India — Chaitra, March or April. Its central rule is startling and entirely characteristic: no fire may be lit in the house on that day. Food is cooked the previous evening and eaten cold — basi, stale, hence Basoda. The cold food is offered to the goddess first. In a country where cooking is daily and hot food is the norm, a festival built on eating yesterday's food is a considerable statement.

Cool offerings. Cold water, curd, buttermilk, raita, soaked pulses, rice cooked the day before, and jaggery. No heat, no fresh cooking, no oil.

Neem. Branches at the door, leaves on the bed, neem paste on the skin. Neem is her tree, and it is used throughout her worship.

The hot season. She is worshipped from Chaitra through Jyeshtha — the months of rising heat — and Mondays and the seventh or eighth of the fortnight are her days in various regions.

Village practice. Offerings at a boundary shrine, often by women, often without a brahmin priest; vermilion on a stone; a lamp; and, in many places historically, animal offering. Women's songs to Shitala are a substantial oral repertoire in Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Braj and Bengali.

After eradication. Smallpox no longer exists. Her worship continues, and has been redirected — toward measles and chickenpox, which are still called by her name in many regions; toward the illnesses of the hot season generally; and toward children's welfare at large. In some places the observance has become simply a spring festival about cold food and neem, with the disease forgotten. This drift is well documented and is a genuinely unusual case of a cult outliving its occasion.

A necessary statement. Smallpox was eradicated by vaccination, through a global campaign in which India's own eradication programme was among the largest public-health operations ever undertaken; the last case in India was in 1975 and the WHO certified eradication in 1980. Measles and chickenpox are likewise vaccine-preventable. DharmSetu records Shitala worship as religious practice and history. It makes no claim that any observance affects the course of any illness, and nothing here is medical advice. Immunisation questions belong with a qualified practitioner.

Shitala's shrines are, characteristically, small and numerous rather than large and few. Almost every village across the Gangetic plain, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bengal has one, usually at the edge of the settlement under a neem tree, and most consist of a stone or a low platform.

Sheetala Mata Mandir, Gurugram (Haryana) — the largest and best-known, drawing very heavy crowds especially in Chaitra; the goddess is identified locally with Kripi.

Shitala Temple, Dashashwamedh Ghat, Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh) — on the ghat itself, one of the most visited small shrines in the city.

Shitala Devi Temple, Kolkata and the numerous Shitala tala of West Bengal villages — the eastern centre of gravity of her cult, with the mangal literature attached.

Shitala Mata Temple, Chaksu (Jaipur district, Rajasthan) — site of a very large annual fair at Shitala Ashtami.

Shil Chhat and the Bihar and Jharkhand shrines, and the numerous Shitala shrines within larger Devi temples across North India.

Nepal. She is Sitala Maju in the Kathmandu Valley, worshipped at Swayambhu and elsewhere, and is one of the significant Newar goddesses.

Her temples are not architecturally distinguished and were never meant to be. The cult's scale is in the number of shrines, not the size of any one of them.

A goddess who is the disease. Most religions explain illness as punishment, as demonic affliction, or as the working out of past action. Shitala's cult does something different: it identifies the illness as the presence of a deity in the body, and responds not by fighting it but by hosting it — cooling the house, quieting it, worshipping the patient. Whatever one makes of the theology, it produced a set of behaviours toward the sick that were markedly humane: the afflicted person was honoured rather than blamed or expelled.

Euphemism as method. She is called the cool one because the disease burns. The naming is a technique — you address the terrible thing by the name of what you want it to become — and it recurs throughout Indian folk religion. It is worth noticing that the same technique produced a practical regimen of cooling, shade, water and neem that was about as good as unaided nursing could be.

Where the religion and the medicine were the same thing. The tikadar who worshipped Shitala and then inoculated was not performing a ritual instead of a procedure. He was performing one act. The colonial ban on variolation in 1804 separated the two permanently, and the modern habit of contrasting "superstition" with "medicine" reads that separation back onto a period where it did not exist.

A cult that outlived its disease. Smallpox was eradicated forty-five years ago. Shitala is still worshipped, still has festivals, still has crowds at Chaksu and Gurugram. Some of that is redirection onto other illnesses; some is inertia; and a good deal of it is that she was never only about smallpox. She is the goddess of the hot season, of children's vulnerability, and of the household's exposure to what it cannot control — and none of those went away in 1980.

What the tradition should be credited with, and what it should not. It should be credited with a nursing regimen that was rational, with an attitude to the sick that was kind, and with an institutional structure that delivered the era's only effective prophylaxis. It should not be credited with having treated the disease. Vaccination did that, and saying so plainly is the only honest way to write about her.