Every autumn two daughters come home. In the Konkan it is Gauri, who arrives in Bhadrapad, a few days after Ganesha, and is seated in the house as a married girl visiting her maher. In Bengal it is Uma, who leaves Shiva on Kailash for four days in Ashvin and returns to her parents’ house with her children. The agamani songs are about a mother waiting at the door. Neither is a distant empress on a throne. She is a daughter, and a daughter at home eats what the household eats.
So on the Konkan coast she is fed fish. In many Koli, Agri, and Maratha homes along the Konkan, the meal for Gauri includes mutton or fish, served on the day she is worshipped. In Bengal, goats were cut in front of the goddess in the old zamindar houses, the bonedi bari, and on Dashami, before she leaves, many East Bengal families give her rice with fish, sometimes hilsa, so she does not go back to her husband’s house hungry.
Then the Vaishnavas arrived and told a different story.
Vaishno Devi in the Trikuta hills of Jammu is the clearest case. Here the goddess is Vaishnavi, a girl who does tapasya waiting for Rama, who has promised to marry her at the end of Kali Yuga when he comes back as Kalki. She is no wife and no mother. She is bride-in-waiting, chaste and patient. Her enemy is Bhairon Nath, a tantric yogi, described in the shrine’s own telling as a disciple of Gorakhnath. At a feast hosted by the devotee Sridhar, Bhairon demands meat and liquor. She refuses. He chases her up the mountain. She hides in a cave for nine months, then cuts off his head. The head lands on a nearby ridge, Bhairon repents, and she rules that no pilgrimage to her is complete without a visit to his shrine.
In this version, meat and wine belong to the Nath and the tantric. The goddess hates both. The tantric gets beheaded and survives only as a subordinate stop on the pilgrim route. This telling spread across north Indian vegetarian shrines through the 20th century, with Arya Samaj and BAPS Swami Narayan influence, with calendar art, bhajan cassettes, and mythological films, and it made the vegetarian Devi feel ancient. How old the written legend actually is remains unclear. The shrine’s mass popularity is recent. This is why North Indians are becoming vegetarian during Navratri and shocked, even disgusted, at eggs and chicken being served in Bengal Durga pandals.
Then there is the Jain claim. Jinasena’s Harivamshapurana, written in 783 CE, chapter 49, tells the origin of Durga as a mistake. Krishna’s sister Ekanasa becomes a Jain nun and stands in kayotsarga in the Vindhyas. Shabara hunters on their way to rob a caravan take her for a forest goddess and pray for success. She dies in meditation. A tiger eats the body, leaving blood and three fingers. The hunters return, see the blood, and conclude the goddess loves blood. They build a shrine to the fingers and start killing buffaloes. Blood sacrifice, in Jinasena’s hands, is a misreading by tribals. And the tiger, Durga’s own mount, is the animal that eats her.
At Osian in Rajasthan the Upakesha Gaccha Pattavali takes the next step. The goddess Sacciya Mata, a form of Chamunda once fed buffaloes and goats, demands something to crunch. The monk Ratnaprabhasuri gives her heaps of modakas. She converts, becomes a lay follower of Mahavira, and turns so vegetarian she cannot stand even a red flower. She is now the kuldevi of the Osval Jains. This same story is attributed to Adi Shankara to explain why Kamakshi of Kanchi is vegetarian whereas Kamakhya of Assam is not.
Goddesses are thus not replaced. Their food is. And much of it has to do with sectarian rivalry and the rise of money power. Marwari and Gujarati trading families, Jain and Vaishnava both, fund the renovations, the marble floors, the bhandaras, the management trusts. Once they hold the purse, the goat goes. Bali stops quietly, a coconut is broken instead, and a story appears explaining that the Mother never wanted blood. Gita Press Gorakhpur, itself a Marwari project, printed vegetarian Devi into millions of homes.
In the Devi Bhagavata Purana (3.26), Vyasa tells Janamejaya how to keep Navaratra. After the fruit offering (verses 30 to 31), verses 32 to 34 add a second path for meat-eaters: buffalo, goat, and boar are the best offerings, animals killed before the Goddess go to heaven, and sacrificial killing counts as ahimsa, echoing Manusmriti 5.44. Two kinds of devotee, both accepted. A popular modern Hindi translation folds all five verses into one line about fruits and a ‘purified offering’. The meat-eaters, the animals, their heaven, and the ahimsa claim, all disappear.
That being said, the Konkan Gauri still eats flesh. The Bengal Uma may soon be eating dhokla. A daughter once fed by her own family may soon depend on a satvik canteens of temple trusts.
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