Taming the Goddess: Vallabha Bhatta and the Shrine of Bahuchara in Late Mughal Gujarat

Vallabha, a Brahmin from the provincial Mughal capital of Ahmedabad in the

eighteenth century, felt curiously drawn to the goddess Bahuchara. In those

days, higher castes like his did not generally visit such deities.

Bahuchara was worshipped largely by Bhils, Kolis, low-status Rajputs and

even some Muslims. Her most significant followers were hijdas: castrati, or

the 'third gender', for whom the goddess was patron and protector. Her

followers made blood offerings of buffalo calves and performed theatricals

in the shrine precincts. Her shrine was to the north-east of Ahmedabad,

strategically located for her followers to intercept goods caravans on their

way between Delhi and Gujarat's ports.  Believed to cure ailments of the

spine, stammering, deafness, blindness, infertility and so on, Bahuchara's

shrine attracted increasing numbers of supplicants from the late seventeenth

century. Vallabha's feelings towards the goddess led him to face down his

caste's antipathy to the shrine. He wrote many compositions in praise of the

goddess, of which Anand-no garbo (song of bliss), became central to the

goddess' worship and to the shrine's reinvention as a safe destination for

upper-caste pilgrims. This paper will show how the enhanced prosperity and

caste mobility of late Mughal Gujarat enabled the re-positioning of such

local deities into nominal shakti pithas (trans-regional goddess shrines)

with greater potential for pilgrim income and higher status. However, the

core followers of the goddess could not be dislodged and continued to resist

attempts to impose upper-caste sensibilities and management styles over the shrine.