Lainingthou Sanamahi
লাইনিংথৌ সনামাহী
Also Sanamahi, Sanamahi Lainingthou.
indigenous
Who this is
Sanamahi is the deity of the Meitei house, and the house is where he is. He is worshipped at the south-west corner of it, the Sanamahi Kachin, by the people of the house and not by a priest, and the corner is kept in Vaishnava households and in households that are not. In the Meitei account he is the elder son of the supreme being and of Leimarel Sidabi, and he was given the houses of men when his younger brother Pakhangba was given the kingdom. The name is usually glossed as liquid gold. He is not presented in the Meitei tradition as a form of any god of the Sanskrit pantheon, and whether his worship belongs inside Hinduism at all is argued in Manipur and is dealt with below rather than assumed.
How to recognise them
No image of a person, and in the house no icon at all: the south-west corner is itself the shrine, it is kept clear and is not built over or used for storage, and the offerings are set down on the floor of it. Where the older Meitei deities are drawn it is Pakhangba who is drawn, as the paphal, the coiled serpent figures, rather than Sanamahi.
Family and companions
The elder son of the supreme being of the Meitei account, whose name is given variously as Atingkok Sidaba, Atiya Sidaba and Salailen Sidaba, and of Leimarel Sidabi, the mother goddess of the earth and of the household. Pakhangba is the younger brother, the deity of Meitei kingship and of the Ningthouja line, coiled at Kangla. Emoinu, worshipped at the fireplace, belongs to the same household company and is identified with Leimarel Sidabi in some accounts. The relations are told in more than one version and the versions do not all agree.
How they are worshipped
Sajibu Cheiraoba above all; Emoinu Iratpa at the hearth, Mera Houchongba, and the Dashami of Kwak Tanba; and the household occasions through the year.
At home, by the household, at the south-west corner: cooked food, fruit, flowers and a lamp set down there, with nothing asked of a priest and no temple required. At Sajibu Cheiraoba, the Meitei new year, the first share of the new year’s meal is offered at that corner before anybody in the house eats. The maiba and the maibi, the Meitei priest and priestess, officiate at the larger rites and at the Lai Haraoba rather than at this corner. A new house is laid out with the corner in it.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The race the elder brother lost
The supreme being set his two sons a race: whichever of them went round the world first would have the throne. Sanamahi, the elder, set out and went. Pakhangba, the younger, did not, and on his mother’s advice walked round his father instead, holding that the father was the world, and he was sitting there when his brother came back. Pakhangba was given the kingship and the Meitei kings descend from him. Sanamahi was given every house there is, which is why he is in the corner of all of them and has no temple of his own to speak of. The same shape of story is told in the Sanskrit tradition of Ganesha and Murugan, and which way the resemblance runs is not settled.
The corner that was not given up
The Meitei court took up Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the reign of Garibniwaz, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and a quantity of the Meitei manuscripts, the puyas, was burnt at that time, which the Meiteis remember as the Puya Meithaba and keep as a day of mourning. Vaishnavism became the religion of the court and of the temples and it is still large in the valley. The household corner was not given up. A family that goes to Shree Govindajee for the kirtan comes home and offers at the south-west corner, and at the new year the corner is served first. That the two layers sit in one house is the plain fact of Meitei religious life, and it is the thing most often got wrong about it.
The movement that took his name
From the nineteen twenties and thirties a reform movement argued that the Meiteis should return to their own religion and leave the Vaishnavism the court had brought in, and Naoriya Phulo of Cachar, who founded the Apokpa Marup, is usually named as its first organiser. It grew a great deal from the nineteen seventies, alongside the return of the Meitei Mayek script, and large numbers of Meiteis now give Sanamahi rather than Hindu as their religion to the census. Whether Sanamahi worship is part of Hinduism or a religion of its own is argued in Manipur and is a political question there as much as a religious one. This entry does not settle it. What can be said plainly is that the household worship is older than the valley’s Vaishnavism, that the two have been kept side by side in one house for three centuries, and that the people who keep it do not all describe themselves the same way.
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
- Manipur
- The household deity of the Meitei valley. The south-west corner is kept in the house, the first share of the Sajibu Cheiraoba meal is set there, and the Sanamahi movement has made his name the name of the whole indigenous religion.
- Assam
- The Meitei settlements of the Barak valley keep the household corner, and Naoriya Phulo, who founded the first of the modern Sanamahi reform bodies, was from Cachar.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own