Shashthi

Shashthi is the goddess of childbirth and the protector of young children, one of the most widely worshipped folk deities of Bengal and eastern India. Her name means “the sixth”, from the sixth day after birth — in traditional belief the critical day on which an infant's fate is fixed — when she receives her principal worship. In centuries when infant mortality shadowed every household, her cult stood at the centre of women's domestic religion, and it remains a living tradition.

The tradition

Shashthi is an old goddess. Figures associated with the sixth-day rite and with the fates of infants appear in early Indian literature, where she is linked with the retinue of the war-god Skanda; over time these strands settled into the benign matron of Bengali household worship. She is pictured as a motherly figure, often golden-hued and nursing a child, riding a cat. The cat is taken seriously as her creature: folk tales warn that one who harms a cat offends the goddess, and her stories circulate in the vrata-kathas recited by women during her vows.

Worship

Her worship is largely aniconic and domestic: a smooth stone beneath a banyan tree, a painted pot, or a simple altar in the courtyard may represent her. Mothers observe Shashthi vratas on the sixth day of lunar fortnights and at fixed points in the year, praying for the health and long life of their children. In Bengal her name also attaches to Jamai Shashthi, the early-summer day on which a household feasts its son-in-law — a festival that keeps her association with fertility and the continuity of the family.