Khodiyar Mata: The goddess rules a stepwell

AHMEDABAD: During the Navratri season, a time when varied communities across India worship the Mother Goddess, it is perhaps appropriate to speak of a part of Gujarat’s

water legacy

associated with a similar divine being. The Khodiyar Mata is a warrior goddess worshipped by the Charan-Gadhvi community in Gujarat and parts of Rajasthan. Interestingly, a temple dedicated to her in Ahmedabad’s Vastral area is actually built on a stepwell.

There is nothing in the outer structure of the temple that indicates the presence of a vav within. Well, almost nothing. A large rectangular hall with iron grills on its walls seems to lead to a brightly painted inner sanctum. It is when you look at the green shade-giving covers that appear beyond the sanctum that you wonder what lies beneath.

Entering the rectangular hall is the same as any courtyard in front of a temple. The difference lies in the path that leads to the sanctum. What from the outside has been painted and given a

shikhara

is not quite the temple’s sanctum sanctorum. It merely tops off a passage that leads underground. As a visitor goes in, the feel is surreal. You are actually inside a medieval vav, going into the depths of the stepwell but are surrounded by embellishment from the contemporary era.

Local people have decorated every inch of the stepwell’s walls with ceramic tiles, many with floral or tree patterns on them. Here and there is a pictorial representation of the Khodiyar Mata. At the end of the stepwell is the well-shaft, now sealed off. This seems to have become the real sanctum sanctorum of the temple, complete with a representation of the Mata, atop her vehicle, a

crocodile

. These icons are at the bottom of the sealed well-shaft. The tile covering of the stepwell is so complete that it is almost impossible to date the period in which the vav was built. While it causes historians to be upset, the stepwell at least has been preserved and kept clean.

The legend of the Khodiyar Mata herself stems from around 700 AD. It begins from a place called Roishala, now a village in

Bhavnagar district

. A man called Mamaniya Gadhvi who lived here was a close confidant of the ruler of the area. His proximity to the ruler triggered a conspiracy which saw him forbidden to enter the ruler’s palace on grounds that he and his wife were childless, and thus inauspicious. A penance to Lord Shiva and a journey to Naglok, the land of snakes, saw him being blessed with seven daughters and a son.

One of these daughters, Janbai, saved her brother from the after-effects of snakebite by journeying underwater to the land of snakes and fetching the elixir of life. Suffering a foot-injury on the journey, she was escorted back to the surface by a crocodile, earning herself the status of a Goddess and a divine vehicle also. Seeing her coming limping back – ‘khodati aavechhe’ in local parlance - saw the name Khodiyar Mata emerge.

The legend of her underwater journey seems to underline the reason that a vav – a subterranean structure that once held water - has become a shrine to her. The fact that the crocodile is an amphibian makes this iconography suitable for a stepwell. Apart from the one at Vastral, there is another Khodiyar Mata shrine in a stepwell at Devdi. She is truly the mata of water structures.


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