Cats in Indian Stories: Shashthi’s Black Cat, a Fake Saint and the Chhath Question

Indian stories have not been kind to cats. In the Panchatantra, a cat plays a holy man and eats two witnesses. In the Mahabharata, a cat strikes a deal with a mouse and the mouse spends the rest of the tale watching its back. Yet one goddess, who guards every newborn child, is said to ride a cat.

This week Chhath is a few days after Diwali, and many of us have heard that the cat is Chhathi Maiya's vahana. That is half true, and the half that is missing is the interesting part. Here is what the texts and folk tales say.

The Gist

• Shashthi, the goddess of children, has a cat as her mount (vahana). Some old images show her with a cat's face.^[1]
• Her cat stars in a folk tale told in Bengal and Goa: a mother blames the cat, the cat takes her babies, and she makes it up with a cat shaped from dough.^[1][2]
• Chhathi Maiya of Chhath is linked to Shashthi by many writers, but not all worshippers agree. The Chhath stories collected in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh do not mention a cat.^[3][4]
• The Panchatantra gives the cat a villain's part. It is a fake saint who eats his judges.^[5]

Shashthi, the goddess with a cat

Shashthi is a Hindu goddess who protects children. People worship her on the sixth day of the lunar month and on the sixth day after a child is born.^[4] One standard reference on Hindu iconography names her mount as a cat (marjara).^[1] Older images may show her with a cat's face.^[1]

Her early role is tied to Skanda, the war god. A text from about the 3rd to 5th century CE calls her his foster-mother and protector. Later texts name her as Devasena, his wife.^[1]

The cat that took the babies

The best-known story about Shashthi's cat is a tale of blame and repair. It exists in more than one version.

In the Goan telling, a daughter-in-law secretly takes food from her father-in-law's house. Afraid of shame, she blames a black cat, and the cat is punished. But the cat is the goddess's vehicle, so it takes its revenge and carries off the woman's newborns to the goddess. Six sons are lost. When the woman understands why, she prays for forgiveness. The goddess tells her to shape a cat from rice flour, tie it with sacred thread to the goddess's image and worship both. The thread is then tied on the newborn for protection.^[2]

In a Bengali telling, the black cat takes the woman's infant children as revenge for an injustice she did it. The cat complains to the goddess, who promises to avenge it. In another version, the cat steals her six children and eats them.^[1]

The story lives on in ritual. On the day of Jamai Shashthi in Bengal, dough figures of Shashthi and her black cat are made and worshipped.^[1] In Goa, the new mother fasts on the sixth day, and the family keeps the baby awake all night with a lamp, games and conch shells, because the goddess may snatch a sleeping child.^[2]

In the Goan telling, the cat did nothing wrong. The woman lied, and an animal paid for it. In our view, that is a gentler view of a cat than most folklore gives.

Is the cat Chhathi Maiya's vahana too?

This is the question that sent us looking. Chhath is a festival of Bihar, Jharkhand, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Nepal Terai.^[1] It honours Surya, the sun god, and Chhathi Maiya, a mother goddess. It falls six days after Diwali, in the month of Kartik, and the rites begin at sunset, which is unusual for a sun festival.^[3]

Many writers treat Chhathi Maiya as Shashthi. In the best-known origin story, King Priyavrat and Queen Malini have no child. They perform a ritual and a bowl of kheer appears from the fire. The queen eats it and conceives, but the baby is stillborn. In grief she goes to a river to end her life, and a woman stops her. The woman says she is Devasena, also called Shashthi, and tells the queen to worship her and the sun god. The queen does, has a child, and the practice of Chhath is said to begin there.^[3]

On the cat, though, the record is thin:

• The sources that name the cat as a vahana describe Shashthi, not Chhath.^[1]
• The Chhath stories written down in field work in Varanasi, Patna, Munger and Sahibganj centre on the sun, on Chhathi Maiya as Surya's sister, and on a revived child. None of them includes a cat.^[4]
• Worshippers do not agree that the two goddesses are one. Younger people in Varanasi, who often learn it from print and social media, link Chhathi Maiya to Shashthi. Older women there describe a mother figure who is not Shashthi, and call the identification a recent trend.^[4]

So if you heard that a cat is Chhathi Maiya's vahana, you heard Shashthi's mount lent to Chhathi Maiya through that link. It is a fair reading if you accept that link. It is not something the Chhath worshippers in that field work described, so we would not state it as a rule of the festival.

The Panchatantra cat: a saint on a sandbank

The Panchatantra gives the cat a far darker role. In the third book, Crows and Owls, a crow tells the tale of The Cat's Judgment.^[5]

A partridge and a rabbit fight over a burrow. The partridge says the neighbours should decide. The rabbit says the law gives the burrow to whoever lives in it. Neither will give way, so they set off to find a judge. The partridge suggests a tomcat named Curd-Ear, who lives on a sandbank by the Ganges and keeps a vow of penance.^[5]

The rabbit is afraid, and quotes a proverb about rogues who act like saints. So the cat puts on a show. He stares at the sun, stands on his hind legs, lifts his paws and preaches that life is brief and that harming others is a sin. He says he could never eat anyone. But he is old, he says, and cannot hear them from a distance, so would they come closer and speak into his ear?^[5]

They do. The cat seizes both and eats them. The crow's point is plain: do not trust a cat who is good at sounding good.^[5]

One note on dates. The English version, by Arthur Ryder in 1925, rests on a Sanskrit text dated 1199. Many of the stories inside it are far older.^[5]

The Mahabharata cat who makes a deal

The Mahabharata has its own cat story. In Book 12, a cat and a mouse talk. The tale teaches statecraft: a weak king, hemmed in by hostile kings (a mongoose and an owl), should make a short alliance with a strong former enemy (the cat). The second half warns that the weaker partner is at risk if the alliance runs on once the strong one no longer needs it, since the cat may eat the mouse.^[6]

A shorter version appears in the Kathasaritsagara, and the tale shares its shape with the frame story of the Panchatantra's second book. A translator of the Mahabharata, James Fitzgerald, has argued that the animal meant here is a civet, not a cat.^[6] The cat in these tales is a shrewd and dangerous neighbour more than a pet.

What the stories say about us

Put the tales side by side and a pattern shows. The cat is clever, patient and not to be trusted in the Panchatantra and the Mahabharata. In Shashthi's story it is the wronged party, and the goddess takes its side.

If you live with a cat, you may see both sides of it.

Diwali is just behind us, and our guide to keeping a scared cat calm through fireworks is still a good read if the cat is hiding under the bed. And if winter is coming where you live, see how to keep your cat warm.

The Bottom Line

Shashthi, who guards children, rides a cat, and a folk tale from Bengal and Goa keeps that cat as the hero of a lesson about lying and blame. The link to Chhathi Maiya runs through Shashthi, and Chhath devotees do not all accept it. The Panchatantra and the Mahabharata draw the cat as a schemer. All of it is old stories and local belief, and each telling differs by region and by teller.

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Images: Shashthi painting, Victoria and Albert Museum (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O71571/painting-shashthi-goddess-of-children-standing/), via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shashthi.jpg. Chhath photo by Bakarpuran, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chhath_Pooja_in_Delhi.jpg