Kamal Gatta, Gomati Chakra and Kaudi

Kamal gatta, gomati chakra, kaudi. If you have set out a Lakshmi puja at home, you have held all three.

The kamal gatta is the seed of the flower She (Lakshmi) is seated on. The kaudi was money in our markets for nine hundred years. The gomati chakra reached us more recently and more quietly, and our families kept it anyway.

The kamal gatta is the seed of the lotus - the flower She is seated on, holds in Her hands, and is named for. Strung into a mala of a hundred and eight, it is what a great many of us count japa on through Navratri and Diwali.

The kaudi was mone in our markets, that our families bought and sold with. Bengal brought cowries from the Maldives from the tenth century until 1833, close to nine hundred years of it. In Odisha they were current until the Company abolished them in 1805, and in 1821 it took two thousand five hundred and sixty of them to make a rupee. When you put a few in the cash box at Diwali, what is in your hand is the old money of this land, kept where the new money is kept.

The gomati chakra is a small shell plate, flat on one face and marked with a spiral, which is where the chakra in the name comes from. They are gathered from the tidal creek at Dwarka. In natural terms it is the operculum of a sea snail of the Turbinidae, the door the animal closes behind itself when it withdraws. That is what it is made of, and it takes nothing away from a family that has kept a few on the puja plate for three generations.

Of the three, the lotus is the one that is written down. Lakshmi is not merely associated with the flower. She is described through it. Padma, kamala, padmasana: seated on it, holding it, named for it. Our Puranas are consistent about it, and the Sri Sukta invokes Her in those terms. Every image of Her any of us has ever seen carries the flower somewhere.

The mala is ours a different way. Counting japa on the seed of the flower Lakshmi sits on has its own plain logic, it is kept in a great many of our houses, and no text sets it down. We say which is which not to rank them but because the two are held differently: what a text prescribes we can point to, and what our families carried we carry on their authority. Both are reasons to keep something. They are not the same reason.

The kaudi comes to us through memory rather than through either. It was current money here for nine centuries, and a household putting some in the cash box at Diwali is keeping the old money where the new money goes - the way a silver rupee of a grandfather’s gets kept. No text asks for cowries at Lakshmi puja, and none attaches a result to how many you have.

The gomati chakra is ours by practice alone. We have not found it named in the Puranas, in the Dharmashastra or in the Tantric material, and where the word Gomati does appear in our texts it is a river, a tirtha, a place, a person. We say that plainly because we would rather tell you how a thing reaches us than attach it to a text that does not mention it. If a source is ever shown to us, we will say so here and score it accordingly.

There is a detail about the name worth having. The Gomati our texts know is a river in the north - it rises in Shahjahanpur, runs past Lucknow and Jaunpur and joins the Ganga near Varanasi, and it is recorded as a tirtha sacred to the Pitras. The shell is gathered at Dwarka, on the other coast. Two different waters, one name.

Widely practiced - Keep eleven, wrapped in red cloth, in the north corner of your locker, and wealth will come.No named text says this, about any of the three.

So there is no placement to get right, no count to reach, no colour to wrap them in and no direction to face them. They go with everything else on the thali.

If you want to use the kamal gatta mala for japa, use it the way you would use any mala - a hundred and eight beads, as many rounds as you have time for. If you keep cowries with the account books or in the cash box, that is a complete practice as it stands. If you have gomati chakras because they came in the kit or because your family has always had a few, keep them on the plate. None of these needs a mechanism to be worth doing.