From Story to Dance: Finding Goddess Svasthani in Khokana Jatra
Author: Ashish Shrestha | Independent Researcher on Culture and Tantra
Published 7th November, 2025
As I am going to see Khokana Jatra today, whose main attraction is the dance of deities that are taken out on Kartik Sukla Purnima and panchami & sasthi or fifth and sixth day of Dashain, I have been thinking about the stories and references I have heard and read about it.
What I know comes mainly from local accounts and a few written articles, not from any single concrete source. I do not claim that the Khokana Jatra is entirely based on the Svasthani Brata Katha, but the more I look at it, the more I sense a connection.
In reflecting on these connections, I turned to Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz’s essay, “Svasthani: Goddess of One’s Own Place”, published in A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses (University of California Press, 2021).
I found her work both meticulous and deeply illuminating. What I share here is what I have understood from her study, my own reading of the Svasthani Brata Katha as she presents it. If there are mistakes or gaps in my interpretation, I welcome correction.
Key Takeaways
Khokana Jatra features sacred dances of deities performed during Kartik and Dashain, reflecting living Newar traditions of devotion and renewal.
The festival’s themes echo moments from the Svasthani Brata Katha, especially destruction, purification, and divine restoration.
The Svasthani Brata Katha, performed each Magh, is a vow-story centered on faith, discipline, and the goddess’s power to both bless and test devotees.
Women play a central role in keeping this tradition alive through fasting, storytelling, and daily worship across generations.
Originating in the Newar culture of the Kathmandu Valley, the Svasthani text evolved from Sanskrit to Nepali, bridging local and pan-Hindu traditions.
Both Svasthani and Khokana Jatra express Nepal’s living link between myth and ritual, where the divine continually returns to everyday life.
About Goddess Svasthani
For Hindus in Nepal, she writes, Svasthani and the month of Magh are inseparable. The goddess is worshipped in the form of a devotional text , the Story of the Ritual Vow to the Goddess Svasthani (Svasthani Brata Katha), which is recited over the course of cold winter nights.
Each year, during Magh (mid-January to mid-February), families gather in their homes to perform this vow. The text is brought out only during this month and is wrapped and stored for the remaining eleven months of the year.
In this way, both the text and the goddess herself are ritually withdrawn and reawakened with the cycle of time.
It involves fasting, storytelling, and worship, and is often performed voluntarily, though some bratas are considered obligatory. In Nepal, as Birkenholtz notes, women are the primary practitioners of these vows, carrying the responsibility for their family’s spiritual well-being.
The Svasthani Brata Katha is one of these vows, performed mainly by women, though men may participate. Its elements, fasting once a day, listening to the goddess’s story, and performing daily rituals, continue for an entire month, setting it apart from most other vows that last a day or two.
What is striking, Birkenholtz explains, is that the Svasthani vow is described as secret, a term suggesting both its divine origin and its esoteric power. In the narrative, Shiva himself calls it a vow that is “difficult to learn of in the three worlds,” one that he has “kept secret until now.”
This secrecy, Birkenholtz observes, may also hint at tantric influence, where ritual knowledge is deliberately hidden and revealed only through initiation.
The story’s origins, Birkenholtz shows, lie deep in the cultural soil of the Newars, the indigenous people of the Kathmandu Valley. The earliest surviving Svasthani manuscript dates to 1573 CE, written in Sanskrit but showing strong Newar linguistic influence.
This was a period of extraordinary cultural and religious creativity in the Valley. The Newars were the primary custodians of the text for the first two centuries of its life, keeping it alive in their language. Later, after the unification of Nepal under Prithvi Narayan Shah in 1769, the Sanskritic-speaking Parbatiya Hindus came to political dominance.
The Svasthani story was translated into Nepali in 1810 CE, allowing non-Newar Hindus to adopt the tradition as their own. This history, Birkenholtz notes, shows how the text adapted to shifting social orders, its growth testifying to Nepal’s complex blending of local and Brahminical forms of Hinduism.
The story itself centers on three characters : Goma, Navaraj, and Chandravati, whose lives illustrate the goddess’s benevolence and wrath. Goma, the humble and long-suffering devotee, performs the Svasthani vow amid great poverty and misfortune.
Her devotion restores her son Navaraj and ultimately brings them wealth and honor. Chandravati, by contrast, rejects the goddess’s offerings and scorns her worship. For this, she suffers disease and ruin, until repentance leads her to perform the same vow and regain divine grace.
In this duality, Svasthani embodies both the power to destroy and to heal, fierce and compassionate, punishing the arrogant and rewarding the faithful.
As Birkenholtz writes, the goddess “illustrates her benevolence when she grants the abandoned and desolate Goma a boon… but she also displays her temper and capacity for destruction when such devotion is absent.”
This tension, between wrath and mercy , defines her as a local mother goddess of Nepal, akin to deities like Shitala and Mariamma in India, who both inflict and cure disease. Svasthani’s power, Birkenholtz emphasizes, is independent and self-sustaining.
Though she is associated with Shiva as his consort, she acts on her own authority, punishing, protecting, and granting liberation.
The title of the goddess, Svasthani, literally “Goddess of One’s Own Place”, is especially revealing. Birkenholtz interprets it as a symbol of protection: Svasthani guards one’s home, one’s family, and one’s self.
“One’s own place,” she writes, is context-dependent, it may mean one’s household, community, or even one’s moral ground. In a broader sense, the goddess protects the integrity of a people and their way of life.
This idea resonates deeply with Nepal’s historical desire to preserve its Hindu identity, to be a pure land of the gods amidst a changing world.
The goddess’s image, Birkenholtz notes, is described vividly in the text. She shines with golden radiance, seated on a lion throne, holding a blue lotus, a sword, and a shield, offering boons and dispelling fear.
With three eyes and a lotus-like face, she embodies both gentleness and strength. Yet despite this clear iconography, Svasthani is rarely represented in sculpture or painting; her true form is the text itself.
Families worship the manuscript as her living embodiment, a profoundly literary form of devotion.
Birkenholtz beautifully calls this the “Goddess of One’s Own Place”, a deity simultaneously intimate and vast. Through her vow, the domestic and divine intersect.
Each Magh, thousands of Nepali families, especially women, renew this connection by fasting, storytelling, and sharing offerings. In the valley town of Sankhu, devotees still gather on the cold riverbanks to recite the stories, bathe, and perform the vow.
Though modernity has changed the pace of life, the tradition endures, even taking new forms, printed books, shorter versions, and smartphone apps.
The goddess, as Birkenholtz observes, continues to live, adapt, and protect the rhythm of Nepali faith.
Over centuries, the Svasthani Brata Katha expanded, incorporating stories from the great Puranas: Linga, Skanda, and Padma Purana, though none originally contained her myth.
As these narratives were woven in, Svasthani was gradually positioned alongside Shiva and Vishnu, reflecting Nepal’s growing Sanskritic connections. This evolution, Birkenholtz argues, shows both the goddess’s adaptability and the subtle negotiation between local and pan-Indian religious forms.
Her “Purana-like” transformation made the Svasthani Brata Katha a primary source of moral and ritual knowledge for Nepali Hindus, their own sacred epic.
In her conclusion, Birkenholtz reminded us that Svasthani is not merely a goddess of legend but a living embodiment of continuity.
Her story has guided the moral and emotional lives of countless Nepali women, linking devotion with resilience, and personal faith with social cohesion.
As the goddess of one’s own place, she stands for belonging, to family, to faith, and to one’s world.
And as I prepare to watch the Khokana Jatra today, where the deities themselves emerge to dance among people, I am reminded that these are not relics of a mythic past but living expressions of sacred time.
Just as the Svasthani Brata Katha renews her presence each Magh, the Khokana dance too reawakens the divine in movement and rhythm, where once again, the goddess steps into her own place, among her devotees.
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