India's Karni Mata Rat Temple

Though it's most famous for its rats, the story of this temple starts with Hindu goddess Durga and Karni Mata, a 15th-century mystic believed to be her incarnation. The reason for the rats in Karni Mata's temple is a combination of legend and devotion.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying And
today we're going to have another listener request. Not long
after we started working on this podcast, listener Carissa asked

(00:23):
us if we could do an episode about the Carni
Mata Temple in Deshnok, India, which is home to thousands
and thousands of rats. Naturally, there's a story there, and
it's a story that's way more than just hey, rats,
there's a lot of rats. That's a lot of rats,
But sadly, a lot of the writing in the West

(00:45):
is really about the rats. So there was a lot
of picking through chaft to find the wheat. Doing doing
the research for this episode, I found lots and lots
of versions of the same story, lots and lots of
contradictory information. So in sifting through all that, I think
we've gotten kind of to the bottom of it. Yeah,

(01:05):
and it has one of your favorite subjects in it.
It does medieval mystics. We have talked about medieval mystics
on the podcast before. When we've talked about Marjorie Kemp,
but this time the medieval mystic is from India, and
all of this really starts with the Hindu goddess Durga.
She is a goddess with several arms, and exactly how

(01:27):
many varies from one depiction to another. Um Often she
is riding on the back of a tiger or a lion,
and in each of her many arms she has a
different holy weapon. So when you look at depictions of her,
she really looks like she could end you, but like
with really righteous love, she's just going to take you apart.

(01:51):
And the reason that she looks so completely dangerous is
that she was actually created to defeat the buffalo demon
Mahisha Sarah, who was invincible. The gods had been trying
to defeat Mahisha Sarah, but they couldn't, so they combined
all of their energy together to bring Drga into being,
and each of the gods gave Drga their holy weapon

(02:11):
to carry into battle against the buffalo demon. And Durga's
battle with Mahisha Sura lasted for nine full days, but
on the tenth day, she finally defeated him, and this
brings us to Karni Mata. She was a fifteenth century
sage and mystic who spent most of her life as
an ascetic. Her followers believe that she is an incarnation

(02:32):
of Durga. She reportedly lived to be a hundred and
fifty years old, and when she died, she vanished into
a flash of fire. She was born with the name
Ri Dubai in seven in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan, India.
This is northwest India and not that far from the
border with Pakistan. She was the seventh daughter born into

(02:53):
a fairly affluent Sharin family. The Sharons were known for
their poets, bards, and story tellers. In the area where
she lived was really mostly scrub land and desert. Most
of the people who lived there were nomads who traveled
from oasis to oasis, and they grew milliant and they
herded sheep and goats and cattle. She's described as being

(03:14):
really assertive starting in her very early childhood, which was
not really acceptable behavior for girls in the culture at
the time. She was also known for being a gifted poet,
a powerful leader, someone who was extremely intelligent, and also
extremely ugly. This last part sort of ties into the
belief surrounding her. The idea is that Durga chose to

(03:37):
be born into an ugly body, having had a beautiful
face in a previous life. When Rido was a child
about the age of six, her aunt was braiding her
hair using just one hand, and Rido told her to
use both hands, but the aunt said that she couldn't
because her other hand was paralyzed, and Rido touched the
paralyzed hand, and according to legend, her aunt was cured.

(03:58):
This shows up in most counts as the first indication
that she was a divine being, and that's when she
began to be known as Carney. So Mada is an
honorary title meaning mother, and Carney means miraculous or divine,
So Carney Mada is a miraculous mother. And there's another
similar story of Carney laying hands to cure her father

(04:20):
of a snake bite, as well as other tales of
miracles and divine deeds that she did throughout her life.
Carney did not want to get married, but she hadn't
yet convinced everyone of her divinity when she reached marriage age.
In particular, her father and her uncle doubted her claims
of being the reincarnation of Durga, and they forced her

(04:41):
into an arranged marriage, and she obeyed um, but she
really didn't have any intention of actually leading what would
be a quote unquote normal married life. The story goes
that her marriage was chaste, and when her husband came
to their bed on her wedding night, he found instead
of his side, a lion in her place. I didn't

(05:05):
realize when I chose this that this was going to
be the second of chased marriages that we would talk
about in in our tenure on this podcast, and the
second time that divine intervention prevented marriage from being consummated.
So Connie didn't really want her husband to be saddled
with this chaste marriage that he did not ask for,

(05:26):
so she arranged for him to be married to her
sister as well. Consequently, she may be the only example
of a person believed to be the incarnation of a
hinded goddess who was also married, which is pretty interesting
that there's a sort of sweetness in it that she's like, why,
I want you to be happy, but not with me
as your wife. That's not going to work out the

(05:47):
way you think. But I'll wear something you can also
marry my sister, And this sort of this came to
back back to bite them a little bit, and uh
not in the way that you might immediately think. Carney's
bargain with her husband and sister meant that her husband
wound up with two wives and two really generous dowries
of cattle. Because remember, they were from a pretty affluent family,

(06:10):
Carney and her sister, So all of these cows put
a huge strain on the local water supply and on
the available grazing land. All of that together provided lots
of reason for the community to really resent Carney's husband,
So the three of them decided to move. The trio
traveled north towards now Deshnoke in what became the Beaconeer district.

(06:31):
This area was the frequent target of warlords from the
wrath Or clan, who hoped to gain power over the
tribes that lived there and establish a kind of feudal government.
In fourteen fifty nine, a wrath Worm man named raw
Bica enlisted Carney's aid in unine ing or perhaps subjucating,
depending on which point of view you have and what

(06:52):
historical sources you've read, the scattered tribes in the area.
So he wanted her help to bring everyone together. The
region was just way too big for a small army
to be able to hold and secure, so Beaca knew
that he was going to need something to give him
a sense of authority. That's something turned out to be
Carni Mata, who had developed a strong religious following in

(07:12):
the area by this point. Beaka did two things. He
consulted Karni Mata often on what his next move should be,
and by following her advice, he gained her blessing. So
one way to look at this is that Karni Mata
helped a warlord invade and conquer a bunch of tribes.
But the other is that she recognized that the only
way to stop the fighting was too if that exact

(07:35):
thing happened, and so she chose to support a man
that she knew could do it and someone she could
influence to make choices that would be better for the people. So,
for example, she made sure that once Vica had taken
over an area, the people who lived there would still
have rights to their ancestral lands. And she also helped
arrange marriages between plans to strengthen the ties between them.

(07:57):
And it took about twenty years for Vica to complete
his unification of the territory, and he continued throughout that
time to seek Carney's advice and blessing. Becca's descendants continued
to rule the area until the Indian Independence Act of
n and Carney Matta became the Baconeer royal family's patron deity.

(08:18):
And you might have noticed we haven't talked about rats
at all yet. No, we have not, But now we're
going to use it. Starts well, we're going to in
a moment that does bring us to the temple. The
first temple was built in Carney's honor in the fifteenth century,
and her husband's descendants were given the honor and responsibility
of managing it. As each new ruler came to power,

(08:38):
he would give gifts to the temple and make some
payments for its upkeep. And this is unique for temples
of this type because it's not actually a temple to
a deity. It's a temple to a human believed to
be the incarnation of a deity. The innermost areas of
the temple were built hundreds of years ago, possibly when
Carney Matta was still alive. Under her direction, Beca's grandson

(09:02):
built a courtyard around the original structure, and that courtyard
was embellished as new leaders came to power, until it
was replaced entirely in the nineteenth century. That outer structure
was replaced again by the one that exists today in
the early nineteen hundreds. The current exterior to the temple
was built by Maharaja Ganga Singh, who ruled beacon Air

(09:25):
from the late eighteen eighties to nineteen forty three. He
was a follower of Karni Mata and he built the
current simple exterior as a tribute to her, but he
also ended the practice of the government giving patronage to
the temple and the interest of modernizing the government. The
outer temple was built in the Late Mughal style of architecture.

(09:46):
This is a style of Indian architecture from the sixteenth
to eighteen centuries and it's uh you would recognize it
in a building like the taj Mahal. It has lots
of carved marble on the walls, marble tile floors, lots
of artis and columns, and silver and gold accents. So
while it's a relatively new structure, it looks pretty old

(10:08):
and historic. It has a very classic look to it.
In the context of other Indian architecture, and the artwork
there includes bas relief carvings of Carni Mata and of
the Hindu god Ganesh with a mouse at his feet,
as well as other statues. The courtyard is also covered
in netting up at this sort of ceiling level to
keep predators away, and there are holes and tunnels built

(10:31):
into the temple for rats to scamper through and run
around in, as well as areas for people to live
in and to prepare food for the rats, which finally
brings us to these twenty thousand rats that live in
the temple. Uh And the reason that the temple is
home to so many rats is actually tied to another
of the stories around Carney's life. There are several versions

(10:55):
of the story, but they all have some common elements.
The first is that a child had died. Some accounts
say that it was Carney's own child, although that contradicts
the idea that she had a chasted marriage. Other stories
say that it was the child of another clansman, or
maybe a particularly important clansman, or perhaps it was one
of her husband's children by her sister, but regardless, the

(11:18):
commonality is that there was a dead child, and Carney
wanted to return that child to life, but Yama, the
god of death, told Carney Matta that the child had
already been reincarnated, so she couldn't bring it back. There
are also several versions of exactly what happened next. One
is that Carney Mata struck a bargain with the Yama
that all of her kin would be reincarnated as rats

(11:40):
before then being reincarnated back into the clan. Another is
that Carney, who had a really infamous temper, was so
angry at her failure that she sort of sentenced to
the tribe to be reincarnated as rats. A third version
is that Karney had her ken reincarnated as rats to
get them out under the control of Yama, so sort

(12:02):
of a reincarnation loophole to get everyone related to her
out from this god who had not given her what
she wanted. But the bottom line is that the end
result is the same Carney's clansmen, through one way or another,
would be reborn as rats, and the rats that live
in the Karney Matta temple, known as Kabbas, are believed

(12:22):
to be incarnations of Carney Mada's clan. They're treated with
great reverence and respect, and they're worshiped because they're believed
to be reincarnated people. This includes the handful of white
rats who live in the temple who are believed to
be the incarnations of Carney Matta herself and her immediate family.
And sometimes uh you'll hear the rats described as reincarnated storytellers.

(12:44):
And this goes back to Carney being one of the
Sharons who are known for being storytellers and bards. As
we mentioned earlier, the rats in the temple are cared
for today by descendants of Carney Mada's tribe and her devotes. Uh.
And there are lots of rules and traditions around these rats. Yeah,
and if a visitor kills a rat, he or she

(13:04):
has to replace it with a golden rat statue. It's
considered to be extremely auspicious if you see one of
the white rats, or if a rats campers over your
feet while you're there, your feet will be bare if
this happens, because visitors are required to take their shoes
off before entering the temple, and there's no real distinction
between the rat areas of the temple and the people areas.

(13:28):
Rats and people live and eat together. And it's also
considered to be extremely auspicious to eat or drink after
a rat. I suspect that makes some of our listeners
cringe a little bit. Yeah, And I think that's one
of the many reasons why so much of the writing
about this temple in the West is sort of focused
on oh, rats, not freaky, But that's really not the

(13:48):
tone in the temple at all. It's a place where
newlyweds often go after their ceremonies to be blessed. Uh
sometimes grooms to be will go to be blessed before
the marriage actually takes place, and this may tie into
a number of fertility miracles that are attributed to Carni
Moda during her life. So the rats have a huge temple.

(14:09):
It's full of tunnels and little hidie holes that would
be perfect for rats. And they get a really um
lovely diet. They get milk, they get a sweet food
called proissan, they get coconut and other delicacies. They're sheltered
and protected from predators. Tracy mentioned that knitting that keeps
predators away up at the top. And so they're living
a pretty privileged life, particularly for a rodent. They are

(14:32):
really pampered and and people try to look after them.
So I think while many listeners may kind of go
reincarnated as a rat does not sound like a good deal,
but these particular rats are pretty pretty well cared for.
The health aspects of this whole practice are a little

(14:53):
bit up for debate. Um. There are visitor reports from
people who have gone to the temple who say that
some of the rats that you see out and about
during the daytime are obviously old and sick, and presumably
have been pushed out of the nests and tunnels by
the healthier rats. There are also reports that no one
has ever seen a baby rat in the temple, although
in photographs you can see juvenile rats, and logically we

(15:16):
know babies would probably be tucked away in a nest
in one of the deeper hidy holes, just as a
protective measure. I mean, that's right, how rodents. Even if
you have seen pet rats who have had babies, usually
the babies are tucked away in a little tiny corner.
They don't they don't get out and run around until
they are bigger and have for There are reports from

(15:39):
believers that no disease has ever been tied to the
temple or its rats, But in the nineties there was
a plague outbreak in India and reports that health officials
were having a hard time controlling its spread due to
quote rat worship. Those are mostly reports from Western newspapers.
Rat worship is not really a Hindu trait. It's particular

(16:01):
to this temple and the story behind it. Typically in India, rats,
as in a lot of the rest of the world,
falls somewhere on the spectrum between dirty disease carrier and
innocuous but also sometimes annoying rodent. And at the same time,
I mean many Hindus are reluctant to harm living things,
so that would make it preferable to relocate a pest

(16:22):
rather than kill it. Also that this is not the
only place where rats appear in the Hindu religion. We
talked a little bit earlier about how there are carvings
of the god Ganesh in this temple, and he is
a Hindu god, most recognizable because he has an elephant's
head and he's often depicted as riding a mouse or
a rat, or with a rodent at his feet. But

(16:45):
it's important to remember that the rats and this temple
are not being worshiped because their rats. They're being worshiped
because they are people, and specifically this mystics people. That
is the whole story of Carni Mata and the rats temple.
If you see pictures, the rats are all they're all
brown rats. They all are They look a lot alike.

(17:06):
They're all about the same signs uh, And you'll you'll
see lots of pictures of them running around and drinking
milk and being fed delicious food. Are there any photographs
of any of the white rats that you found? I
found really kind of grainy, blurry ones that tourists had taken. Um.
We have made an image gallery on the website of

(17:26):
lots and lots of pictures of the temple and the
rats in it, and I don't think there are any
white rats in those pictures that were taken by professionals.
They're only reported to be a handful of them, really,
about five, while the reported number of rats and the
rest of the temple is twenty thousands. So I just wonder,
since it's so auspicious to see one, how rare it

(17:48):
is for people to get an eyeball on them. Yeah,
the people that are the caretakers of this this temple
and the rats, and it's they know where they are
likely to hang out because as many animals, they all
sort of have their own little corner and territory that
they like the most. And so if the if the
caretakers know where they are, they can usually point people

(18:09):
in the right direction. But still, if there are so
many more brown rats than a white one, the odds
are not in your favor. Not really, It is much
more likely that rats will run over your feet. Since
they are around humans so much, they don't have fear,
They're not really afraid and even you know, I used
to have a pet rat a very long time ago,
and tame rats are not really scared of people. No,

(18:33):
like any tame animal, they don't mind being held and
picked up and all of that. So that is the story.
As I was getting into research, I was afraid I
was not going to be able to find enough information
written in English that was not whoa rats, because so
much of it is really just the shock that there's

(18:54):
a huge rat colony that's cared for, right, and a
lot of you know, misunderstanding about what that is all about. Yeah,
so yes, I also have some listener mail, please share it.
I have a couple more letters about our Loving Versus
Virginia episode. Again, because we talked about that for two episodes,
I've got a whole lot of mail we did, indeed,

(19:15):
a whole lot of really interesting mail. This first one
is from Alexandra, who says, Dear Tracy and Holly, your
recent podcast on the Loving Versus Virginia case inspired me
to dig a little into the anti assgination laws. In
my home state of California, interracial marriage was banned until
ninety eight here, but there was a brief conundrum for

(19:36):
Filipino and white marriages from nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty three,
since it was unclear and the anti assination law whether
Filipino people could be categorized as part of quote the
Mongolian race, which was prohibited from intermarrying with white people.
A small number of interracial couples received court mandates to
issue legal marriage licenses. After Filipinos were ruled by a

(20:00):
court to be part of the quote melee race, the
legislation that outlawed interracial marriage was amended to include quote
melee persons like Filipino. This topic holds a soft spot
in my heart because I've come from a Filipino American
family that seems to have dodged this antime sag nation
bullet by only one generation. My grandparents married in the

(20:20):
Philippines and night and promptly moved to the United States.
My mother and all but one of her siblings have
married Caucasian people. My father included. I myself unmarried to
a wonderful man who has colonial Scott's Irish ancestry, and
it's just about as quote white as they come. And
it just breaks my heart to think that a couple
like us only seventy years ago would have been unable

(20:42):
to spend their lives together just because lawmakers wanted to
preserve a quote pure white race. Thank you very much
for that. Oh Holly is making them not a not
a sad face. This whole thing is to be very
choked up. I know. We we had to compose ourselves
several times while recordings. When there are chunks of the

(21:04):
podcast for only Tracy talks, it's because I was crying
too much. It's okay though, that Yeah, that was definitely
material that that was close to both of our hearts.
So um, thank you very much for providing that perspective.
Really a lot of what what we were covering, just
because of what was being discussed at the time was
about African Americans and white Americans, and so hearing how

(21:26):
that also related to people of other cultures and races.
I really yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. Um. We also got
a message from Tom who says I've been enjoying the
latest two episodes on Loving versus Virginia. I grew up
in Central Virginia, where Loving is a common last name,
and was completely unaware of the Lovings until the last

(21:47):
ten years or so. You made a reference to Caucasians
being able to marry Native Americans with no more than
one sixteenth Native American blood at the time of the
court case. This goes back to Virginia's Racial Integrity Act
of nine The one sixteenth provision was put in place
to appease the descendants of Pocahonas and gen Rolfe, who
otherwise would have been listed as colored under the provisions

(22:10):
of the Act. A lot of the racial purity work
in Virginia was by Walter Ashby Plecker, who, along with
the Racial Integrity Act, the Sterilization Act, and the eugenics movement,
may make a good subject for a future podcast. The
effects of the racial Purity Law are still being felt today.
Native American tribes in Virginia have been unable to obtain
federal recognition because in order to do so, tribe members

(22:31):
need to be able to trace the tribal lineage. Since
Native Americans were classified in Virginia as colored or even Negro,
they have been unable to trace continuous lineage. And then
he sent us some helpful links on this subject. So
I had two thoughts, uh from this letter. The first
is that the Pocahontas exception had come up in the

(22:53):
research of m of the episode, and it was one
of those things that I wanted to confirm before we
talked about it in the episode, and then I got
derailed and all of the other material in the episode. UM,
so thank you for bringing that up. UM. The other
is that I I was intrigued by this idea of
Native American tribes in Virginia being unable to trace their

(23:15):
lineage because of being classified as colored or Negro. I
have an aunt who has a long Native American history
and is also extremely interested in the family genealogy, and
she has talked about being able being unable to trace
her own ancestry beyond a certain point, not because they
were classified as a particular race, but because the government

(23:38):
in the areas where she is from just basically stopped
keeping up with Native American birth and death records, and
so if the tribal records no longer exist, there's definitely
not anything. There's a huge gap. Um. So I didn't
I did not realize that there were other reasons as
well that Native American people and people with various ancestry

(24:01):
would not be able to trace their lineage back. So
thank you very much for that new That's a cool
insight into what was to be an incredibly frustrating situation
to be trying to track things down that you just
can't because they got kind of rubber stamped in a
kind of inappropriate way, or not rubber stamped at either case,

(24:23):
it's an unfortunate aspect of American history. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other topic,
you may at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Twitter at Misston History and on Facebook at
Facebook dot com slash history class Stuff. You can find
us on tumbler at miss in History dot Tumbler dot

(24:44):
com and we're on Pinterest too. We have made an
image calorie full of images of this temple and some
of the other Indian culture related to it, and you
can go to our website type in the word wrap
Temple and you will find that can a whole lot
more at our site, which is how stuff Works dot com.

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