The cult of the Subaltern Goddess: Maa Manasa and the gendered politics surrounding anger, envy, survival and dependency
-Oishee Bose
Maa Manasa appears in the Bengali imagination not as a cosmically secure deity but as a goddess who has to forge her identity through strength, persistent storytelling, and the fearsome ability to chastise those who reject her. To study Manasa historically is thus to examine a point of conflict: between local worship and broader Hindu orthodoxy; between female ritual traditions and male mercantile power; and between Bengal’s marshy lands full of snakes and a Sanskrit-based religious system that struggled to incorporate a serpent goddess. The outcome is a deity who simultaneously serves as guardian and retributor, healer and destroyer, sacred medicine and a form of cultural expression. Maa Manasa is therefore best understood as a truly subaltern goddess, whose wrath exposes the anxieties, marginalisations, and compromises inherent in medieval Bengali culture just as much as it mirrors the experiences and apprehensions of her worshippers.
The Manasa-mangal texts is recited, enacted, and continually transformed throughout Bengal, which go beyond simply narrating her tale; they dramatise the struggle through which a peripheral goddess demands acknowledgement. These stories do not assume Manasa’s supremacy; they argue for it. Her divinity is not self-evident but historically contested, forged through conflict, ritual performance, and the compelling logic of divine punishment.
Origins and texts: the Manasa-mangal world
The bulk of our knowledge about Maa Manasa derives from the Manasa-mangal (Manasamangal Kavya) tradition, a corpus of Bengali mangal (auspicious-ode) poems and oral performances that crystallised between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, while incorporating much older folk practices. These compositions are not doctrinal texts but narratives, intended to be, performed, sung aloud by mangal-gayak performers in households, marketplaces, and village gatherings. Their chant, “Joy Maa Manasa,” functions both as invocation and reassurance, a constant reminder that the goddess can protect her devotees from snakebite, misfortune, and death.
Importantly, the mangal genre itself operates as a legitimising genre. Like the Chandi-mangal or Dharma-mangal, the Manasa-mangal exists to establish a deity’s authority within a contested religious landscape. These poems were pragmatic cultural forms, grounded in lived belief rather than abstract theology. They addressed communities whose survival depended upon protection from environmental and occupational hazards, framing devotion as a material necessity rather than merely an ethical choice.
Ecology and emergence: folk religion in early medieval Bengal
The cult of Manasa did not emerge suddenly as a fully developed religious system. It evolved gradually from the early medieval period (c. Eighth–ninth centuries) through the late medieval period (thirteenth–sixteenth centuries), deeply rooted in Bengal’s distinctive ecological conditions. Dense forests, wetlands, riverine deltas, and monsoon-dependent agriculture made snakes an everyday reality. In such an environment, serpent worship long predated Sanskritic Hindu theology.
Archaeological, ethnographic, and textual evidence suggests that nāga worship developed independently among fisherfolk, peasants, forest-dwellers, and river traders. What later texts identify as “Manasa” originally comprised a constellation of serpent spirits and mother-goddess figures associated with fertility, protection, and healing. This earliest phase corresponds to what historians describe as the “little tradition”: orally transmitted, locally rooted religious practices concerned primarily with material survival rather than metaphysical speculation.
Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, under the Pala and Sena dynasties, Bengal witnessed agrarian expansion, increased trade, and the growing presence of Brahmanical institutions. Yet, Brahmanical Hinduism did not simply erase local cults; instead, it negotiated with them. It is within this transitional milieu that Manasa acquires a name, a genealogy (as the daughter of Kashyapa or Shiva), and a moral personality capable of demanding worship. Her anger, far from being incidental, becomes the narrative mechanism through which she asserts divine authority.
The Chand Sadagar episode: fury as a claim to authority
The canonical Manasa-mangal narrative centres on a wealthy Shiva-devotee merchant of Champaknagari who refuses to worship Manasa, mocking her as “that one-eyed hag.” In several versions of the tale, Manasa’s injured eye, inflicted by Parvati or Chandi, serves as a corporeal marker of her exclusion from the divine household. This wound is symbolic: it inscribes rejection onto her very body.
Manasa’s response to Chand’s refusal is catastrophic. One by one, his sons die; his wealth collapses; his household is ruined. The poems consistently associate non-recognition with disaster, transforming divine anger into a marker of social legitimacy. Worship is not optional; it functions as a social contract enforced through fear.
Behula, the heroine and wife of Chand’s youngest son, becomes the agent of reconciliation. Through extraordinary endurance and devotion, she brings back her husband to life and compels Chand to offer Manasa a reluctant acknowledgement—a flower presented with the left hand. This gesture signifies submission rather than reverence, yet it is sufficient. Even minimal recognition restores order.
Read historically, this is far more than a domestic drama. Chand represents mercantile wealth, patriarchal authority, and Sanskritic exclusivity. Behula and Manasa together embody the riverine, marginal world that challenges elite religious dominance. The narrative stages Manasa’s forced integration into Hindu worship; recognised, but never fully embraced.
Pantheon and rivalry: Parvati, Chandi, and symbolic exclusion
Manasa’s troubled relationship with Parvati or Chandi is among the most revealing dimensions of her mythology. As Shiva’s consort, Parvati represents secure inclusion within the Sanskritic pantheon. Manasa, by contrast, is a contested daughter whose legitimacy is perpetually questioned. The hostility between them transcends personal rivalry; it functions as symbolic boundary-making.
Parvati embodies institutionalised sanctity, while Manasa represents vernacular power. Acts of violence directed at Manasa by Parvati in certain narratives reflect the exclusion of local cults from the dominant religious order. Manasa’s envy, therefore, is not mere bitterness but the emotional trace of unequal access to legitimacy.
Subaltern theory and Manasa’s fury: reading with Ranajit Guha
Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies framework offers a productive lens through which Manasa’s mythology could be viewed. Guha argues that subaltern groups possess autonomous forms of consciousness and resistance that elite narratives routinely marginalise. His concept of “dominance without hegemony” is particularly relevant: power is sustained not through consent, but through coercion and partial accommodation.
The cult of Manasa reflects this dynamic. Elite Hinduism never fully embraces her authority; it tolerates her presence because she cannot be ignored. Manasa’s incorporation into Hinduism was partial and hierarchical. She was granted a genealogy, a narrative space, and seasonal rituals, yet denied temples, permanence, and parity with canonical goddesses. Her worship remains local, vernacular, and situational.
Manasa’s mythology never resolves into harmony because historical reconciliation never occurred. Her anger persists as a memory of exclusion. Manasa, in turn, does not seek affection or moral consensus. She demands recognition through fear. Her anger is not divine caprice but a narrative articulation of subaltern consciousness, marked by negation, resistance, and insistence.
The Manasa-mangal thus functions as a form of subaltern historiography. It does not erase conflict; it preserves it. Chand’s humiliation becomes a symbolic inversion of hierarchy, asserting that legitimacy can arise from lived experience rather than descending solely from scriptural authority.
Gender, anger, and the refusal of respectability
A striking paradox in Manasa’s mythology is that although she embodies healing, fertility, and protection, she is never presented as an ethical ideal for women to emulate. Unlike figures associated with patience, devotion, and restraint, like Parvati, Lakshmi, or Sita, Manasa is characterised by anger (krodha), envy (īrṣyā), and wounded pride.
This is not a narrative flaw but a discursive strategy. Manasa’s emotional excess marks the boundary between respectable femininity and threatening female power. The tradition carefully separates female moral virtue (embodied by Behula) from female divine potency (embodied by Manasa). A woman who openly demands recognition and enforces obedience cannot be rendered socially normative.
Yet, respectable femininity proves inadequate in moments of crisis. Patience cannot cure snakebite; submission cannot restore life. In situations of danger and existential uncertainty, it is Manasa, not Parvati, who is invoked.
Healing, dependency, and power beyond morality
Manasa’s emotional volatility does not undermine her healing power; it intensifies it. Devotion to her is grounded not in love or bhakti but in dependency. She protects children, cures venom, restores fertility, and safeguards livelihoods not because she is morally exemplary, but because she is effective.
For subaltern women in particular, Manasa offers a form of strength unavailable in normative goddess figures. She legitimises anger as a response to neglect, envy as a reaction to exclusion, and demand as a strategy of survival. She becomes a repository for emotions that respectable society seeks to discipline, yet repeatedly relies upon in moments of crisis.
Conclusion: Manasa and the politics of emotional legitimacy
Maa Manasa is neither a defeated deity nor a flawed female figure. She represents a historical archive of subaltern power that emerges from below, demands recognition, and resists full absorption into orthodox frameworks. Her anger functions as political memory; her envy marks the imprint of unequal legitimacy; her healing power demonstrates that respectability is not the sole source of authority.
In refusing to become an ideal, Manasa becomes something more radical: a refuge for those whose lives unfold amid danger and uncertainty. She reminds us, as Guha insists, that the subaltern may not speak in the language of the elite but it does speak, through stories, rituals, fear, and the uncompromising insistence on being acknowledged.
