Yellamma

Sanskrit textual tradition identifies Yellamma with Renuka, the wife of the sage Jamadagni and mother of Parashurama, sixth avatar of Vishnu. In the myth, Jamadagni orders Parashurama to behead his mother after perceiving impurity in a fleeting desire she experienced, and Parashurama, alone among her sons, obeys; when Jamadagni later grants him a boon for his obedience, Parashurama asks that his mother be restored to life.

Regional retellings connected to Yellamma's own worship add further complication to this base story, including versions in which the restoration goes wrong and a substitute body or head is used, an element some traditions use to account for dual or composite features in her temple iconography. The identification with a pan-Indian Puranic figure gives a regional Deccan goddess a Sanskritic pedigree, a common pattern by which local goddesses across India have been linked to figures from the wider textual tradition without those two layers, the regional cult and the Sanskrit myth, necessarily originating together. Some regional tellings connected to Yellamma add a further, locally specific episode not found in the pan-Indian Renuka material, in which the goddess is cursed with a skin affliction after Parashurama's intervention, an addition scholars read as the local cult explaining aspects of its own iconography and ritual through an extension of the borrowed Sanskrit story.

Yellamma's shrine at Saundatti has historically been among the most prominent sites in India at which girls, typically from lower caste and economically vulnerable families, were ritually dedicated to the goddess as devadasis, a dedication that in earlier centuries carried temple service obligations but which, particularly from the colonial period onward, became closely tied in this specific regional context to a life of sex work with no institutional protection, since the dedication itself carried no legal marriage status and no property rights for the woman involved.

Indian state legislatures moved to end the practice by law: Karnataka passed the Devadasis (Prohibition of Dedication) Act in 1982 and Andhra Pradesh passed comparable legislation in 1988, both making the dedication itself a criminal offence. Scholarship on the practice, including ethnographic work documenting devadasi women's own accounts of memory and continued marginalization after the legal ban, records that dedication continues in reduced and less public form in some areas despite the law, a persistence this entry states as a documented fact rather than as a claim about the present scale of the practice, which is difficult to measure precisely by its own clandestine nature.