She Who Is Filled with Food, and the Kitchens of Kashi

Annapurna is the goddess of food and of the full storehouse, a benevolent form of Parvati shown holding a serving ladle and a bowl of cooked rice; her name means she who is filled with food. Her chief temple stands at Varanasi (Kashi) beside the great Kashi Vishwanath shrine, and the story told there has Shiva himself, who teaches that the material world is maya, illusion, come to her with a begging bowl, only to be answered that hunger, at least, is not illusion, so that even the great ascetic must receive his food from the goddess.

The theology has a practical face: Annapurna is the guarantor that no one in her city goes unfed, and the free food-kitchens (annakshetra) attached to her temples act on that promise. In a notable modern episode, an eighteenth-century statue of Annapurna removed from Varanasi was returned to India from the University of Regina in Canada in 2021, part of a wider movement to repatriate looted sacred images.