ಜ್ಯೇಷ್ಠಾ ಲಕ್ಷ್ಮೀ ವ್ರತ | Jyeshtha Lakshmi Vrata

Jyeshtha Lakshmi Vrata falls on the seventh tithi of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada and is decided by the tithi current at sunrise. It is kept by married women, and like the Gauri vrata earlier in the same fortnight it is built on the idea of a goddess arriving at the house as a guest and being sent off again.

What is done

Lakshmi is installed for the day, usually as a decorated face or mask set on a pot or on a frame of bamboo, dressed in a saree and given ornaments so that she stands like a woman of the house. Small footprints are drawn in rice flour from the threshold inwards, marking her path in. She is offered the sixteen services, sixteen kinds of leaf or flower where the household keeps that form, and a meal of the food the family considers best rather than of anything prescribed. Married women are invited, given kumkuma and a tambula, and the image is set aside or immersed after the send off.

The vrata is kept for the prosperity and continuance of the household. It is not a fast of the severe sort; the day is spent in preparation and in feeding people.

The same visit in Maharashtra

What Karnataka keeps in one day, Maharashtra keeps in three, as Jyeshtha Gauri. There the days are fixed by nakshatra rather than by tithi: the goddesses are brought into the house on Anuradha, worshipped on Jyeshtha, and sent off on Mula. Two figures are installed rather than one, spoken of as elder and younger sister, and the middle day carries the great meal, sixteen vegetables and puran poli. Because the Maharashtrian reckoning follows nakshatras and the Karnataka reckoning follows the saptami, the two need not coincide, and a Kannada household in Mumbai will often find the neighbours a day out of step.

Goa and the Konkan keep forms close to the Maharashtrian one. In Karnataka the observance is strongest in the northern districts, which is where the boundary between the two customs actually runs.

The name

Two confusions are worth clearing.

• The vrata has nothing to do with the lunar month Jyeshtha, which falls in early summer, nor with the nakshatra Jyeshtha except in the Maharashtrian reckoning above. Here jyeshtha simply means the elder, and it names Lakshmi in her senior aspect.
• There is an older and quite separate goddess called Jyeshtha or Jyeshtha Devi, known in Tamil as Mudevi, the elder sister of Lakshmi and the personification of misfortune, who has her own images in early South Indian temples. She is not the deity of this vrata, and the shared name has misled more than one account of it.