Renuka Yellamma

Legend and Origin

In the Mahabharata (Vana Parva 116) the sage Jamadagni marries Renuka, daughter of the king Prasenajit. She sees the king Chitraratha at play with his wives, is overcome by desire, and Jamadagni orders his sons to kill her. The four elder sons are struck dumb and cursed; the youngest, Rama (Parashurama), cuts off her head at his father's word, and when Jamadagni offers a boon, asks that she be restored to life. The epic does not call her Yellamma or treat her as a goddess. At Saundatti the Gazetteer of 1884 records a local telling: that Yellamma is said to be the same as Renuka, that after she was restored her husband's curse struck her with leprosy, that she was cured after long devotion to two seers, and that she built the temple in honour of the cure on the hill that was her original home, from which she went to fetch water from the Malaprabha. The Gazetteer says nothing is known of the shrine's origin. It places the present temple in the seventeenth or eighteenth century and its predecessor not earlier than the thirteenth, and records an inscription of A.D. 1514 (Shaka 1436) in the west gate, which tells that Bommappa Nayaka of Bagi (Raybag), serving King Krishnadevaraya, built an upper storey over the stone hall of the west door. At Mahur, Outlook Traveller gives the temple as thirteenth-century, built by the Yadavas of Devagiri; its legends say her head fell there, or that Parashurama performed her last rites there. Wikipedia's Mahur article cites the Devi Gita for a Matripura in the Sahyadri where the Devi Renuka dwells, which it takes to be Mahur. The two shrines are separate places with separate stories, though sources call both the same goddess.

How the Deity Is Shown

At Mahur the image is described as self-manifested (swayambhu), with only the head visible above ground (Outlook Traveller). At Saundatti the temple stands in a courtyard enclosed by arcades of pointed arches, with a gate of older pillars like those of the Jain temple in Belgaum fort (Gazetteer, 1884). Some tellings explain the dark face of her images by the story that another woman's head was placed on her body (Wikipedia).

How Families Keep the Worship

At Saundatti the Gazetteer of 1884 records that the priests were Lingayats, forty families in eight divisions, each serving in turn, and that pilgrims gave a head tax with clothes, coconuts, cash and ornaments. Vows then included walking before the goddess clad in neem leaves; barren women offered lampstands and silver cradles with gold figures of children, burnt camphor on the spire, or lit a thousand lamps. Hook-swinging, which the Gazetteer records as practised by 175 people in 1834, and naked processions, which it says stopped in 1855, are no longer kept. Today devotees bathe in the tank at the foot of the hill and change into new clothes; the neem-leaf vow, called Nimmana in Wikipedia's account, is kept, and water from a well named Jogal Bhavi is believed to cure skin disease (Wikipedia). The shrine is tied to the devadasi and jogini traditions of dedicating girls and, in some accounts, transgender people to the goddess; the dedication of girls is prohibited by Karnataka law (Wikipedia). In the Belgaum district gazetteer the Marathi (Kulvadi) Kunbis name Yellamma at Ugargol among their family gods, and the Hanbars (household gods Maruti and Yellamma), Korvis (Maruti, Yellamma, Huligeva, Mailar, Basappa) and Panchals (Ravalnath, Malhar, Yellamma) name her too. Families keep her by branch and village, so a family should ask its own elders whether she is its kuldevi.

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