The Santoshi Mata vrat katha is the story of a young daughter-in-law whose husband went far away to earn, and who found her way through hardship by keeping a vrat of Friday worship with jaggery and roasted gram. It is read every Friday of the vrat, and again at the udyapan, the closing celebration after sixteen Fridays.
Santoshi Mata's vrat has no festival date; it is kept on ordinary Fridays, and many who keep it also keep the goddess's nine nights of Sharad Navratri. For the full year's festivals see the festival calendar, and for how the Friday puja is done, the Santoshi Mata puja vidhi.
Who Santoshi Mata is
Santoshi Mata is the goddess of contentment, santosh. In popular tradition she is the daughter of Ganesh, born when his sons Shubh and Labh asked for a sister on Raksha Bandhan and a flame from the brows of his wives Riddhi and Siddhi took the form of a girl. Her worship spread mostly by word of mouth and by small printed vrat books, and became known across India in the twentieth century, helped very much by the popular Hindi film Jai Santoshi Maa. The story below is the one those books and the film share.
The story of the young wife
An old woman lived with her seven sons. Six of them worked; the youngest did not, and while his mother cooked fresh food for the six, she gave him what they had left on their plates. His wife saw this and told him. Stung, he decided to go away and earn his own living. Before leaving he asked his wife for a token, and she pressed her hand, dusty with dough, on his shirt as a mark of remembrance.
He travelled to a distant city and found work with a wealthy merchant. He was honest and quick, and in time the merchant made him a partner. Busy with the business, he slowly stopped thinking of home.
His wife meanwhile was left in the large household with the other sons' wives. They gave her the hardest work: fetching wood from the forest, grinding, carrying water. She was fed the husks of grain and water from a broken coconut shell. She bore it in silence.
One day, on her way back from the forest, she saw a group of women at a temple doing a puja. She asked whose worship it was and how it was kept. They told her it was the vrat of Santoshi Mata: on Fridays, with whatever one could afford, one offered jaggery and roasted gram, heard the story, and took no sour food that day. One kept it for a set number of Fridays, often sixteen, and then held an udyapan, feeding eight boys.
She sold her bundle of wood for a few coins, bought jaggery and gram and began the vrat. On the following Fridays news came: first a letter from her husband, then money. Her sisters-in-law grew sharper with her, but she kept on. One Friday she cried at the temple and asked the goddess when she would see her husband again.
That night Santoshi Mata appeared in the husband's dream and reminded him of his wife and home. He woke troubled. In the story his accounts were tangled and his goods unsold, but within a day everything was settled, he received his dues, and he set off for home with gifts for everyone.
When he reached the village his wife was coming back from the forest with wood on her head. She went to the temple first, as was her habit, and the goddess told her that her husband had returned. She went home, and her husband, seeing how she was treated, set up a separate house with her. They lived in comfort.
The udyapan and the sour food
When the Fridays she had vowed were complete, she prepared the udyapan and invited eight boys, the children of her sisters-in-law among them. Jealous, the sisters-in-law told their children to ask for money and to demand something sour. The boys ate the sweet food, then asked for coins, and with them bought tamarind and ate it.
The story says the goddess was displeased. Soon after, the king's men came and took the husband away, saying the money he had brought home was not honestly earned. The young wife went to the temple in distress and asked what she had done. She was told that the rule of the udyapan had been broken. She resolved to hold the udyapan again, this time with care. Her husband was freed, his earnings were found to be honest, and he came home.
Later a son was born to them. Santoshi Mata came to visit the family in the guise of a frightening old woman. The household ran from her in fear, but the young wife recognised her and welcomed her with joy. The goddess blessed the whole family, and the sisters-in-law too began to keep the vrat.
Reading the story calmly
This is a folk tale, and like many it uses a sudden reversal to teach. It is not a warning that a bite of something sour will bring trouble on a family. Children asking for a treat is the most natural thing in the world; the story's real fault lies with the adults who made jealousy into a plan. What the young wife does is simply begin again, patiently and without blame, and that is what families who tell the story today point to. The goddess's last visit, in a form no one wants to welcome, makes the same point: she recognises the one who can see kindness under any face.
Other tellings
- In some versions the husband's token is a ring rather than the dough-print on his shirt.
- Some books name the merchant's city, others leave it unnamed; the arrest is told as being for unpaid taxes in some and for a false charge in others.
- The number of Fridays varies by family. Sixteen is most common; some keep the vrat until a wish is fulfilled, then hold the udyapan.
How the katha is heard
On each Friday of the vrat, after the puja, the katha is read aloud while those present hold a few grains of gram and jaggery in their hands. At the end the grains are offered, the aarti Jai Santoshi Mata is sung, and the gur-chana is shared. Children often hear the story first this way, from mothers and grandmothers on a quiet Friday morning.
What the story carries today
The Santoshi Mata vrat is one of the gentlest in the calendar. It asks for only a handful of jaggery and roasted gram, which almost any household can spare, and its heroine is a woman with nothing who keeps her faith and her kindness. For many women it was a vrat of their own, needing no priest and no expense.
Two related stories are the Satyanarayan katha, another home puja anyone can do, and the Solah Somvar katha, the other vrat kept for sixteen weeks. Families who like to begin the Friday puja in a good period look at the choghadiya and avoid the Friday rahu kaal.