Mayndala, the New Mother Taken into the Unseen

A woman has given birth three days ago. She is lying in the room set aside for new mothers, with seven midwives beside her, a tiny silver sickle and a tiny umbrella near her hand and frankincense burning. In the middle of the night, when a cock crows, the lord of the manor calls her name outside the door.

The lord has never done such a thing, and she knows it. This page tells what happened next, and why women across Tulunadu now pray to her.

The story

Almost everything on this page comes from one source: the American anthropologist Peter Claus’s 1979 paper, which prints a translation of the paddana as sung by an elderly woman named Kargi, of the Mundala community, at Anjar village near Hiriyadka. She said she learned it as a child from an older woman, and sings it in the field as well as at home.¹ Claus says that the paddana (the sung oral epic) is sung in countless slightly different versions, that he heard it sung through three times, and that all versions agree on the core events and relationships.¹

A new spirit at the manor

At the manor of Bannara lives Lord Pangala Bannare. One day a calamity falls on the calves in his cattle shed and the children in their cradles. In these stories, Claus explains, this is how a new spirit makes itself known. The lord takes off his silver waist band and keeps it, as a promise of an offering if things get better.¹

The next day he goes to a Brahmin diviner, who casts cowrie shells and tells him that a great spirit has come to his court. It is Panjila Jumadi, “Jumadi and the boar”. The spirit wants a bali nema, a feast-offering, with a serving basket of cooked rice, and tender coconut fronds and the flower of the areca palm, pingara, for its costume.¹ For the spirit, see Jumadi, Neither Man nor Woman.

One coconut

The lord calls the heads of the neighbouring households and tells them to go through the villages, leaving no house out. From each house they are to bring one tender palm frond and one tender coconut.¹

Every house gives. At Hill-House, the home of Alibali Nayaka, the collectors get a different answer. The frond he will give, he says, is the blade of the screw-pine tree, and the nut he will give is the nut of the strychnine tree. He adds: may a host of forest spirits come to the court of Bannara!¹

When the lord hears this, he does not argue. “It does not matter if Alibali Nayaka does not give,” he says. “If there is a great spirit at the court of Bannara, it will cause these things to be given.“¹ Claus reads this as a wak, a challenge to the spirit, and not a mild threat.

The ceremony in the field

The lord has Pambada Parava Ramu, the dancer-medium, summoned. Ramu arrives with a decorated bull, and the bull stumbles and falls on its face. The lord tells him not to be afraid, puts his hand on its withers, and the bull gets up. Ramu puts on the costume, the spirit enters him, and the procession goes out to the great field in front of the manor.¹

Then the spirit asks for an hour. It takes the form of Lord Pangala Bannare, and goes to Hill-House.¹

The cinder

In Hill-House lies Bale Mani, Alibali’s sister, who gave birth three days ago. In the middle of the night, at the time a cock crows, the lord calls her name. He asks for a bit of burning coal.¹

She says she cannot. She has been a mother for only three days, and has seven midwives with her. She offers to wake them. He tells her not to, because they have worked hard all day. She offers to wake her brother, and he says that Nayake sleeps like the dead after climbing palms all day.¹

At last Bale Mani gets up. She takes her small silver sickle and her tiny umbrella, and takes a coal from the incense pot. She puts one foot across the doorsill, holds the umbrella before her face, and hands out the coal with her right hand. The lord tells her not to spoil her brother’s fortune, and to put both feet across. When she does, he takes the coal with his left hand, and with his right draws her into the unseen world.¹

“For the sake of one tender palm frond, for the sake of one tender coconut!” she cries. “My brother gave me into the hand of Jumadi!” She asks that her baby be brought too. The spirit puts a hand through the window, draws the cradle out and takes the child.¹

The brother, and the lord’s niece

When Alibali wakes, he calls for his sister. Her voice answers from the drain of the bath house, from the taro patch, from the river bank where the clothes are washed. Each time he runs there, and she is not there. When he finally understands, he weeps. The next day he has coconuts and fronds cut from his own trees and carried to the manor.¹

The lord refuses them with the same sarcasm Alibali used: the blades of the screw-pine are Nayake’s fronds, the nuts of the strychnine tree are his coconuts. Alibali begs for mercy. Bale Mani, now a spirit, tells him she is there, and that she will raise a fire in the lord’s belly.¹

The lord’s niece has just given birth. Bale Mani goes to her, sits on her mat, and takes her into the unseen world. She makes the niece into a waterfowl, which stays on the carved rail of the cattle shed. “Because of one tender coconut and one tender palm frond,” the lord cries, “she came to my court!“¹

So they remain at the court of Bannara. Bale Mani sits beside Jumadi. The lord’s niece, in the form of a waterfowl, sits on the rail of the cattle shed and lulls her baby to sleep.¹

The goddess Mayndala

Claus says that in the places where Mayndala has been worshipped “from time beyond memory”, she is a subsidiary deity with a specialised cult, held on the third day after the ceremonies for the lord’s spirit and his warrior servants. Her patrons are women who ask for an easy childbirth and protection for their infants, though the people who carry out the rites are all men.¹

A man serves as her medium. The Parava dancer who is possessed by her dresses in a sari, and, while he puts on his costume, he or the women of his family sing the paddana.¹

Are Mayndala and Bale Mani the same?

Claus took some time to work out that they were. In one village where her cult had just become popular, he writes, many worshippers could only say that she was the “sister” of the warrior heroes Koti and Chennaya. All Tuluvas know that the twins have only one sister, he says, so this meant only that she was a “caste sister” of the Billava heroes, and belonged in their shrine.¹

The story was settled when the village shrine put a loudspeaker on the paddana at the first ceremony. The women in the crowd realised that it was the legend of Bale Mani and Lord Pangala Bannare, which they had often sung in the fields. The Paravas, Claus says, hold that Mayndala is Bale Mani, and he accepts this, while allowing that they may not be “the same spirit” historically.¹

Why her worship grew

When Claus first came to South Kanara in 1967, landlords were beginning to leave their rural manors for the cities, and a land reform law was about to make each tenant a landowner. In the past 10 to 15 years, he writes, Mayndala’s cult had spread to new villages, where thousands of women made offerings to her while only dozens attended the older ceremonies for the lord’s spirits.¹

He offers reasons, and says they are his. Women take more part in religion generally, and he suggests they like a female spirit who has “broken out of the restrictions” that bind them; he describes the awe and delight of women watching Mayndala dance in a sari and jewels. He also reads the paddana as a story of a household punished because its male head neglected the cult of the lord’s spirit. As women see their men neglecting such duties, he suggests, they begin to fear the same for themselves, and so they worship the spirit that could afflict them.¹

What we could not find

• Other tellings. The story here is one version, from one singer. Claus says there are many, and mentions one with a long opening about Bale Mani’s marriage and pregnancy, which he could not record. We have not seen another.
• The Mundkur blog post. Our notes on this story come from a post on Tulu Research & Studies that we could not open. We have left out what rests only on it, including the meaning of the name, the comparison with Annapurna, and the account of a performance that enacts the birth.
• Where her shrines are. The paper names no shrines, and our other sources are silent.
• Whether her worship has continued. Claus wrote in 1979, about the 1960s and 70s. We have found nothing more recent.

Related

• Jumadi, Neither Man nor Woman, the spirit who takes her
• Koti and Chennaya, the Twin Heroes, whose “sister” she is called in some shrines
• Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away and The Siri Jatre, where women themselves are possessed and a man leads the night
• Bhuta Kola: When the Spirits Come to the Village, the night ritual and how Mayndala’s worship grew

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. Peter J. Claus, “Mayndala: A Legend and Possession Cult of Tulunad”, Asian Folklore Studies 38(2) (1979), pp. 95–129 (read in full on 9 October 2026; JSTOR): the translated paddana, the commentary on it, the cult and the reasons for its growth.

Further reading

• Peter J. Claus, “Possession, Protection and Punishment as Attributes of the Deities in a South Indian Village”, Man in India 53 (1973), pp. 231–242, cited by Claus.

The page rests on a single scholarly paper, from the 1970s, which prints one singer’s version of the story.