Annapurna
அன்னபூரணி अन्नपूर्णा
Also Annapoorneshwari, Annada, Visalakshi at Kashi.
ShaktaSaiva
Who this is
Annapurna is the goddess of cooked food, and the shrine that defines her is at Kashi, where Siva himself begs from her with a skull bowl. The tradition is making a point with that: the ascetic who has renounced everything still has to eat, and what he eats comes from her hand. She is the reason no one is turned away hungry from a temple kitchen, and the anna danam, the giving of food, is held to be the one charity that cannot be done wrongly. Her name is simply full of food.
How to recognise them
Standing or seated, holding a ladle in one hand and a vessel of rice or payasam in the other, serving. Often shown in the act of putting food into Siva’s begging bowl, he standing before her with the bowl held out. Red or gold clothed, calm faced, with no weapon at all, which almost no other form of the goddess manages.
Family and companions
Parvati, in the form she took to settle an argument with Siva. Siva as the beggar is part of the iconography rather than a separate figure. At Kashi she stands beside Visalakshi, and the two are counted together.
How they are worshipped
Akshaya Tritiya; Annakut the day after Diwali; the full moon of Margashirsha at Kashi.
Anna danam, the free feeding of all comers, is the worship, and a temple kitchen is her shrine as much as her image is. Akshaya Tritiya and Annakut after Diwali, when a mountain of food is built and offered and then given away, are her days. In Kerala the Annapoorneshwari of Cherukunnu takes the first rice of the harvest.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The argument about what is real
Siva told Parvati that the material world, food included, was maya, an illusion, and not to be taken seriously. She answered by vanishing from the world, and with her went all food: the crops failed, the kitchens went cold, and the gods and the people starved. Siva found that an ascetic who has renounced everything still cannot teach on an empty stomach. She appeared at Kashi with a kitchen and began to feed everybody, and he came before her with a begging bowl and she filled it. The tradition reads it as the one argument Siva lost, and keeps the image of him holding out the bowl.
Why no one is refused
Out of that story comes the rule that food given is never counted or conditioned. A temple with an annadanam does not ask the caste or the faith or the need of the person in the queue, and the Kashi Annapurna kitchen, the Guruvayur and Udupi halls and the Puri Ananda Bazaar all work the same way. Where other offerings are measured, graded and reserved, this one is deliberately not, and the justification given is always the same: it is hers, and she did not ask Siva for his credentials either.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- The Annapurna temple stands beside Vishwanath at Kashi and its kitchen feeds continuously; the golden image is shown for a few days around Annakut.
- Kerala
- Cherukunnu Annapoorneshwari takes the first rice of the harvest, and the Kerala temple sadya is held to be her offering.
- Karnataka
- Horanadu Annapoorneshwari feeds every pilgrim who comes, three times a day, and no one is asked anything before being fed.
- Tamil Nadu
- The Annapoorani shrine at the Siva temples and the annadanam at Palani and Thiruvannamalai are her form of worship in the Tamil country.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
Where to see them
From the temple directory
- Kashi Vishwanath Jyotirlinga, Varanasi Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
What is said
From the mantra library