Photographers:

[N.B. Many of the photographs have been slightly tweaked. The light at Deshnok is evidently very strong and most photographs taken there end up with very bright highlights and very dark shadows: so many of these images have been adjusted to lighten the dark areas while leaving the highlights untouched, to maximize the amount of visible detail.

There are a few more photographs which will be added later if and when I get permission to use them.]

Adam R Lee, a Professor of English teaching in South Korea: images from his collection of pictures of Southern Asia.

Mark Harris: images from the Bikaner section of his A Travel Picture Gallery, which covers much of the Far East, Middle East, Central and South America and Uzbekistan.

Francoise Cooperman, beer-expert and proprietor of Vermin Brewing, which has an excellent website devoted in equal parts to beer and rats, provided numerous stills taken from a video of her trip to Deshnok, plus very helpful descriptions of various aspects of the site.

Mike Meaney, Irish programmer and web designer, from the India - Large section of his photo' directory of images from his 2½ year trip round the world. Note that the India - Large page contains 60 high-resolution photographs - the standard is very high, but if you don't want to spend 40 minutes downloading all the images you can go to Mike's thumbnails page to pick the photo' of your choice.

Janet and Chris Beaudin and Susan Romeril - image from the India Pictures section of their the big trip website, which chronicles their journeys through Nepal, India, and South East Asia between October 1998 and July 1999.

Kees van Duyn, a.k.a. duke0123, a former soldier, now telecomm administrator, living in Assen, The Netherlands and aiming to break into web design: from his Fascinating India page at the Virtual Tourist site.

David Montouroy, from Deshnok page of his French-language site Mon Voyage en Inde: this site is elegant and sophisticated in design and worth a look even if you can't read the text.

Matt Long and Heidi Thoren, from the Mandawa & Bikaner page of their Our Passage to India site.

Prominent BBC wildlife-photographer John Downer: photo's taken from the Rat Relatives section of Mr Downer's book Lifesense, and used with the permission of John Downer Productions Ltd..

Rainer Stalvik, who has a Swedish-language site on "Worldwide Advanced Trekking" with images from his travels around India, the Far East, Northern Europe and South America.

Frédéric Hemmer, from the Deshnoke, Temple des Rats page of his French-language site L'Inde en 1001 Photos.

First two photographs of religious pictures of Ganesh, and picture of Durgha, are Copyright © 1996-current year Kamat's Potpourri - The History, Mystery, and Diversity of India (All Rights Reserved). This is a very lively, chatty, well-designed site full of all sorts of information and images - worth a visit even if you didn't know you were going to be so interested in India.

Photograph of painted rondel showing Ganesh and his rat eating laddus is from the Invocation page of Repainting the Past: A Golden Jubilee Exhibition Of Post-colonial Indian Miniatures. This exhibition, of mid to late 20^th C religious miniatures/illuminations painted in Rajasthan in traditional mid-18^th C style, was held in 1997 at Saint Xavier University's SXU Gallery in Chicago, to mark the 50^th anniversary of India's independence from the Raj. The curater was Michael D. Rabe, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History at Saint Xavier University, Chicago. Click on the rondel of Ganesh to read about this particular painting's meaning and history.

The history of humanity’s treatment of animals normally regarded as pests is unedifying: but Hindus tend to be refreshingly reluctant to harm other life-forms - even ones found raiding the kitchen. This is also true of Buddhism and, even more so, of Jainism (a primarily Indian faith theologically intermediate between Hinduism and Buddhism, which broke away from Hinduism in the 6^thC BC). Problems with rodent-born diseases etc. mean that the Indian government officially takes a very dim view of rats, especially following an outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1990s; but Indian villagers still catch marauding rats in live-traps and carry them away from their homes to release them into the wild, rather than killing them, and someone once told me that many Indian sailors regard ocean-going rats more as pets than as pests.

A few of the ancient, indigenous tribes in India regard rats much as Westerners regard rabbits - cute and edible. The Irula (or Arula or Eravallon), a forest-dwelling people related to the Tamil, live (or used to live) in thatched houses of wood, mud and straw in the Nilgiri hills in the south-west of India, subsisting on the produce of the forest and their small gardens. Technically mostly Hindu, they still follow many elements of their own private, local religion, and regularly kill rats and roast them with spices. The Mushahar, whose name even means "rat food" or "mouse food", are another indigenous "ethnic" tribe living in Bihar in the north-east of India, and in neighbouring Nepal. They are poor, regarded as low caste "untouchables", living as landless labourers and sharecroppers and by fishing and gathering wild roots. They regularly eat rats to supplement their meagre diet.

Mainstream Hindus, however, tend to at least respect and often like rats the way Westerners like squirrels, as attractive creatures in their own right; and they not only do not eat rats but as far as possible avoid killing them. Rats are said to represent foresight and prudence, as well as darkness (in the sense of "nighttime" rather than evil) and the sense of smell. A rat is the traditional vehicle or vahana of the merry elephant-headed Hindu deity Lord Ganesh or Ganapati, god of new beginnings and of fire, knowledge, wisdom, literature and worldly success. Ganesh is a major power, who may have started out as a Dravidian (aboriginal) solar deity (Richard Carlyon, A Guide to the Gods): gana pati means "Lord of Hosts" and he is also called the Lord of Dharma or natural law. He is also a very popular figure who (unlike most other gods) is recognized and revered by nearly all Hindu sects, and so rats benefit partly by association: "It is a sin to kill the companion of our God" [Amita Roy, of Vasant Kunj, New Delhi].

Exactly how Ganesh, who is portrayed as a very large, fat man with four arms and the head of an elephant, could ride on a rat is never fully explained. When Ganesh is dismounted his mount is shown as about the size of his foot (usually wearing a dinky little rat-sized red saddle-cloth); but when he rides his rat is proportionately as big as a small pony, and it's not clear whether the rat gets bigger or Ganesh gets smaller.

The mount of Ganesh is most commonly called Mooshika, "Little Hoarder"; and occasionally Mooshikam, Minjur or Akhu. Accounts vary as to whether "Mooshika" is a personal name or a descriptive term ("mousie" - really), and what sex he/she is, though male seems to be the more usual choice - some pictures show him complete with un-rattily tiny testicles. Accounts also vary as to whether Mooshika is a rat or a mouse (but then like the Romans Indians may well regard the ship rat as just a big mouse, which is pretty-much what it is); and, if a rat, whether he is a Norway, ship or bandicoot (large murines of genus Nesokia, not related to the marsupial bandicoots of Australia) rat. Some sources even say that the mount of Ganesh is more properly a shrew: but certainly it's normally nowadays believed to be a rat, or sometimes a mouse.

It may be that a major and much-loved deity was credited with riding on a rat's back because rats were already well-liked. Although the rat of Ganesh is there as a symbol of something, he's still portrayed affectionately as a very real, ratty rat, often nibbling from his own private platter of food, and seems to be credited with far more character, and far more active collaboration with his master, than any other vahana except Shiva's white bull Nandi ("Joy-Giver" - probably so-called because of his association with male sexual equipment!). Mooshika acts as his master's agent, venturing into the tiny spaces where his roly-poly rider could never fit, and even as his advizer or co-conspirator. According to one story, Lord Shiva once held a contest to see which of his sons could circle the universe the fastest. Swift-footed Kumari, god of war, set off to race around everything that was; but tubby, slow-moving Ganesh consulted his rat, who told him to circle his parents and then tell them they were the universe. It was for this piece of theological insight/blatant flattery that Shiva granted Ganesh the title "Lord of Auspicious Beginnings".

In an article entitled Rats in Hinduism: Ganapati's Rat Karen Yang recounts many legends associated with Mooshika. In one version, he was once a mighty but slow-moving demon whom Ganesh defeated in battle: he offered to become Ganesh's faithful servant if the god would only turn him into the most agile creature on earth, so Ganesh made him into a rat (a ship rat, presumably). Ganesh is Lord of Obstacles, both placing and removing them: and he and his rat make a perfect team for the removal of obstacles; since those which don't respond to being charged and battered, elephant-style, can be gradually ground away by the rat's teeth. Mooshika makes sure his master remembers the tiny things as well as the large, down to the smallest atom: and he is the guardian of the Wishing Jewel. This magical gem granted its owner his or her every wish, and thereby corrupted its human wielders into greed and power-mania: so Ganesh gave it into the keeping of his rat because the wishes of a rat - food, sex, companionship and safety from predators, a little territory to play in, a warm nest to sleep in - are pure-hearted, homely and harmless. [This particular bit of the mythos suggests Mooshika is a Norway rat - since the wishes of male ship rats tend to include world domination and getting to urinate on absolutely everybody.]

[N.B. this is a Scottish joke. T in the Park is an annual Glaswegian pop-concert.]

Calcutta has its own special rat park, located at the northern end of the Maidan, Calcutta's great green complex of gardens and sports-grounds. Curzon Park, a small area of trees and fenced-off patches of greenery, is near the tram terminus and close to the square called Binay, Badel & Dinesh Bag (a.k.a. B.B.D. Bag) at the heart of the city. It contains a large colony of fat and very happy rats.

The rats are said to "...take shelter at the base of a statue of a mighty industrialist." Some descriptions say the rats are contained within a wire enclosure, but there's a photograph of it at the Catch Cal Calcutta tourist-site, and it couldn't possibly keep them in - it just seems to be there to protect their burrows from trampling human feet. Writing on the Soul of India travel-writing site, Kenneth Wilson describes their colony thus: "The normally nocturnal disease-carriers [sic] were scuttling about the dusty earth, from which every blade of grass had been scraped away, in and out of the trenches and burrows that made the ground look like a miniature battle field."

These rats, who have dug themselves a warren under the trees, certainly aren't Rattus rattus - since they have comparatively small ears and short tails. They could be Norway rats, who build extensive tunnel-systems in the wild, or could be Nesokia indica, the bandicoot rat, which is also an habitual burrower. Local office workers spend their lunch-hours feeding them, exactly the way people in Edinburgh feed the grey squirrels in Princes Street Gardens, except that here there is a religious element. Juliet Clough, writing in The Observer on 8^th October 2000, refers to the Maidan's "feeders of sacred rats." Kenneth Wilson likewise quotes a local taxi driver who told him "Don't miss our enormous rats... So many people worship God in this form. It is because Ganesha travels on a rat. So we have the biggest rats, and the biggest rat colony in the world..." This last must be debatable - considering the size of India's own rival colony of sacred ship rats.

However, in another sense she had plenty of children - tens of thousands of them. Karniji's temple at Deshnok is home to (at peak population) more than 20,000 little Rattus rattus, who swarm all over any proffered food, and sometimes over humans (ones they know, anyway), in the manner of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Male and female rats in that area are called chuhas and chuhiyas - but the rats of Karni Mata are called kabas, Marwari for "little children", and if a visitor accidentally treads on and kills one (which is made less likely by the fact that visitors are required to take their shoes off before entering - though socks are permitted), he or she must atone for the death by presenting the temple with a lifesize model rat made of solid gold (according to most sources - though The Observer says solid silver).

Visitors say that most of the time - in the heat of the day, anyway - the temple compound isn't obviously heaving with rats, except in the inner courtyard. At first glance you see only a few: but the more you look the more there are, and every shadow is full of eyes and tails.

The Indian Patriots Council has a long but not very sympathetic (in that it regards devotees of the Karni Mata cult as gullible fools) article about the rat temple. It states that:

“Legend has it that rats have been revered ever since Karnidevi’s ["devi" just means "goddess"] stepson Laxman drowned in a tank and Yama, the god of death, refused to concede her request for Laxman’s rebirth, saying that he had already been reborn as a rat. Instead Yama promised her that from then onwards her male descendants would be born as rats in her temple at Deshnok. And once they give up their life as rats, they would be born again as human beings in the family of Depavats, as her descendants are known today. The rats here are sacred as they are regarded as incarnations of Karnidevi’s descendants.

"The temple is looked after by the Depavats. There are 513 Depavat families altogether. The male members of these families take turns as priests, following a centuries-old tradi­tion. And all families get an equal share of the offerings at the temple. Ten per cent is kept apart for the needy among the Depavats. 40 per cent of the rest is divided among the 513 Depavat families and the rest kept in a fund that is used for the temple’s upkeep and developmental works."

According to another site, the portion of the offering which is distributed to the priests and workers is called Dwar Bhent, and that which goes on the maintenance and development of the temple is called Kalash Bhent.

The Observer says that there are more than 700 families of the poet-king caste, and that every month a priest is appointed from one of them. During his tenure he lives day and night with the rats.

There seem to be a number of slightly different versions of the story of how the temple rats became sacred, though all agree that they are vessels for human souls. In the version quoted above Yama/Death comes across as being quite helpful and on good terms with Karni Mata. But according to the above-mentioned February 1996 article in The Observer, the dead child was Karni's own son and called Lakkan (according to other sources Lakkan or Lakhan was both her stepson and her nephew); what she had asked for was not his rebirth but that he should be revived as Lakkan, in his original body, but this could not be done because his soul had already passed on very rapidly (which makes more sense both of what Karni was asking and why it couldn't be done) and been reborn into a rat; and in rage she swore that all her descendants would henceforth pass into rats when they died, and never spend time in Yama's kingdom.

Yatraindia likewise gives a version in which Yama and Karni Mata appear to be at odds, although in their version the lost child is not presented as a close relative of Karni's, and has already been re-born not as a rat but as a human:

"Apparently Karni Mata once tried to restore a dead child of a storyteller back to life but failed, as Yama, the god of death had already accepted his soul and re-incarnated him in human form. Karni Mata, famed for her legendary temper, was so inflamed by her failure that she announced that no one from her tribe would fall into Yama’s hands again. Instead, when they died all of them would temporarily inhabit the body of a rat before being reborn into the tribe. Hence the mousy creatures... are considered to be incarnations of storytellers and are much revered."

[It is probably this "legendary temper", combined with the fact that she seems to have acted as a military as well as a political adviser to the local rulers, which caused Karni to be associated with weapon-wielding Durgha rather than with one of the more placid, fertility-and-vegetation aspects of the goddess.]

Similarly, a page (no longer in existence) which used to depend from the allindia.com website reports that:

"IN heraldic Rajasthan, genealogy is the warp of life and so the Bhatt and Charan bards are respected as keepers of racial memories. The bards, in turn revere a woman who was a mystic and is now worshipped as Karni Mata. In the temple of Karni Mata in Deshnok many believe that the Charans are reincarnated as holy rats who scamper and squeek and nibble around the trident-wielding image of Karni Mata enshrined as the Mother Goddess Durga. The reincarnated rodents are an answer to a boon granted to Karni Mata. Her clan never descends into the kingdom of the god of death, Yama, but waits out its time till next human life in the bodies of these rats, secure in her protection."

However, The Rat in the East (which also seems to be no longer extant) gives a somewhat different version, saying that:

"During Karni Mata's life a terrible fever came upon the land and thousands of children in the area died. The parents came and begged the goddess to ask the god of death to give their children back to them. The negotiations led to a compromise. For each offering to a rat, a child would be reincarnated in a rodent."

Despite these different versions of how the kabas came to have human souls, there seems to be a general agreement that this interim incarnation into rats ensures that Charans will always spend their human lives as Charans, rather than being reborn into other peoples and places. Theologically, I suppose the temple rats are seen as a sort of holding area where dead Charans can wait until another Charan body becomes available - without ever having to face the judgment of Yama or take the chance of ending up in Heaven or Hell. This is rather different from the mainstream Hindu belief in incarnation into a wide variety of human and non-human bodies and locations, according to one's accumulated karma: if the Charans believe in karma in the usual Hindu sense, then evidently they don't mean to have much to do with it. This may indicate that their unusual belief-system predates Karni, and perhaps Hinduism itself.

It's not clear whether the Charans believe that all the temple rats have been and will be human, or only some of them: but they certainly believe that any given rat at the temple might be a fellow Charan. And the Charans do sound like the sort of people ship rats would be, if they happened to be reborn as primate people rather than rodent people.

Yatraindia describes Shri Karni Mata ("temple of Karni Mata") thus:

"The temple itself was erected by Maharaja Ganga Singh in the early 20^th century [sic - in fact the inner shrine is mostly 16^th C] and is built in the late Mughal style. The entrance to the temple complex has beautifully sculpted marble panelling, with intricate patterns, a tribute to the fine workmanship of the artisans who constructed it. It is lavishly decorated, especially the delicately worked doorways, colonnades, pavilions and balconies. Petalled domes rise over the sanctuary. The sanctum sanctorum of the temple depicts Karni Mata resplendent in her arrogance after slaying the buffalo-demon Mahishasura. Her inverted trident depicts the head of the demon impaled at one end."

This militant statue is elsewhere described as being the work of a blind sculptor and being 2ft tall or a little over, standing on a 3" platform. Actually a bas relief panel rather than a free-standing figure, it is dark orange-red and shows Karni Mata adorned with earrings, with a garland round her neck and wearing a strange tall crown, narrow at the forehead but with a wide brim around the top, capped with gold. In her right hand she carries a trident, points upwards, with the severed head of the buffalo-demon impaled on the butt end; from her left hand the severed head of a manlike demon dangles by the hair.

The sculptor seems to have been ambiguous about whether to portray Karni as a mortal woman or a goddess: the statue shows her carrying Durgha's weapon and having slain demons that Durgha slew, but with the two arms of a flesh-and-blood woman rather than Durgha's usual eighteen. Perhaps because the sculptor was blind, or perhaps because it is very old, the statue of Karniji does not have the sinuously ornate look one associates with most Hindu art: instead it has the stark simplicity of an archaic, early or pre-Mediaeval European figure of the Virgin.

Karni Mata surrounded by rats and a pigeon, from silver doors of shrine: photo' by Francoise Cooperman

She is flanked by seven smaller statues, which appear from photographs to be bizarrely-carved stump-like red blocks, and are variously described as either all sisters of Karni Mata, or as Karni Mata's sisters and the sisters of Avad Mata. These seven small statues are presumably a variation on the Sapta Matrika, the Seven Mothers venerated in rural, village Hinduism. Now usually regarded as the consorts and shakti or female energy of the major male gods, these were originally rather ambiguous and sinister figures, believed to be both the bringers of potentially fatal childhood diseases and the powers appealed to for prevention or cure of those diseases: not so much the Seven Mothers as the Seven Baby-Snatchers, they liked children so much they came and stole them away.

Avad Mata may be a female personification of the localized land-soul of the area between the Ganges and Jamuna rivers, called Avadh or Oudh - in the same way that Kathleen, the Daughter of Hoolihan is a female personification of the land-soul of Ireland. Or she may have something to do with the actual meaning of the word avadh, which is "boundary" or "limit".