Many Forms of the Goddess

 I was raised in Telangana and married into coastal Andhra. Over three decades of adulthood, I have watched the Goddess take on remarkably different forms across these invisible borders, within the same religion.

In Telangana, she arrives as Bathukamma, a stack of wildflowers gathered from untamed lands and arranged by women’s hands. Through Bathukamma, women have found a way to release their pain into the water, asking the Mother to hear them and bear witness to the strength born of survival. Her beauty lies in endurance.

In coastal Andhra, Ammavaru is invoked differently. She is abundance, sensuality and adornment, a goddess expected to be magnificent, who moves through homes in gaiety.

I have watched her unfold through my life: in adolescence, she was a mystery; in marriage, a ritual; in motherhood, a fierce, tired, tender presence. Now, as I settle into middle age, I find myself in awe of the unexplored possibilities of the sacred feminine. She is no longer divided into the one I was taught to admire and the one I was taught to fear.

During Navaratri, I find a quiet temple and let the magnanimity of it all soak in. There, I sit with this lineage, with the generations of women before me who endured and stood their ground so that I could walk where I do today. I may never know their names, but I carry their strength.

Navaratri is my way of acknowledging the millennia of shoulders I am privileged to stand upon. The Goddess remembers. She reminds us that the feminine is not merely a force that endures, but a Shakti that can nurture and annihilate.

— Tuljha Bhavani Reddy, architect and author