Savitri Ji

Savitri is the heroine of a celebrated Mahabharata episode (the Savitri-Satyavan Upakhyana, in the Vana Parva), honoured as the ideal of a devoted wife whose intelligence and steadfastness overturn a divine decree of her husband's death.

She is remembered chiefly through the epithet Pativrata, the devoted wife whose fidelity carries near-supernatural power, a quality the episode itself is sometimes titled to honour, Pativrata-mahatmya Parva.

She is not given a fixed temple icon; her presence is invoked instead through ritual action, most visibly the thread married women tie around a banyan (vat) tree during the Vat Purnima/Vat Savitri observance, the tree itself standing in for the story's forest setting.

Princess Savitri, daughter of King Ashvapati, chose as her husband Satyavan, an exiled prince living in the forest with his blind father Dyumatsena, despite being warned he was fated to die within a year. When Satyavan died as foretold, Yama, god of death, came to take his soul; Savitri followed them into the forest, and her arguments and unwavering devotion so moved Yama that he granted her a series of boons, ultimately restoring Satyavan's life.

Daughter of King Ashvapati; wife of Satyavan, prince of a kingdom lost by his blind father Dyumatsena, whose own sight and kingdom Savitri's boons from Yama also restore.

Her story is retold each year at Vat Purnima (Vat Savitri), observed by married women across North India and parts of Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, who fast and tie thread around a banyan tree in prayer for their husbands' long life, directly modelled on Savitri's own devotion.

The observance and the precise timing of Vat Purnima/Vat Savitri differ by region, some communities marking it on the full moon (Purnima) of Jyeshtha and others on the preceding new moon, though the underlying story and its meaning remain consistent.