Kolhapur, the old Karavira, holds the seventh of the eighteen, and it is the entry in the list where the goddess's own identity is the interesting question. Her name is Lakshmi's and the local mahatmya of the town is Vaishnava, holding that Vishnu himself dwells at Karavira; her image carries a lion, a small linga with a serpent above her crown and a Sri Chakra on the temple wall, all of which belong to the goddess of the Shakta tradition rather than to Vishnu's consort. Both things are true of the same image, and what a visitor makes of that is genuinely open. Beyond the eighteen, Kolhapur is also the first of Maharashtra's own three and a half seats of the goddess, with Tuljapur and Mahur and the half at Saptashringi — a regional enumeration, separate from both the eighteen and the fifty-one, and the one many Marathi pilgrims are actually counting. The temple is best known for a thing the building does rather than the goddess: on a few evenings twice a year the setting sun enters through a western opening and moves up the image over three days.

Claims, and where they come from

• Kolhapur is seventh of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, and the goddess named there is Mahalakshmi. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Second verse, closing half, directly after Alampur and Srisailam and just before Mahur. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional, not established
• Whether this goddess is Lakshmi or a form of Parvati has been argued from the image itself, and this corpus does not settle it. — Argument from iconography, read against the shrine's own name and local mahatmya — On one side: a lion stands with the image, a small linga with a serpent sits above the crown, and a Sri Chakra is carved in the temple — the lion is Durga's, and a linga on the crown is read as marking Shiva's consort rather than Vishnu's. On the other: the goddess's name is Mahalakshmi, the local Karavira Mahatmya is a Vaishnava text holding that Vishnu dwells here, a Lakshmi Sahasranama invokes her as she who dwells in Karavira, and the site is absent from the classical fifty-one-peetha list, whose geography is overwhelmingly eastern. No peer-reviewed treatment of the question was reached from this session, so the argument is reported and not adjudicated. What is not in dispute is that the shrine is treated as a seat of the goddess by the stotra, by Maharashtra's own tradition and by everyone who worships here
• Kolhapur is the first of Maharashtra's three and a half seats of the goddess. — Regional Marathi tradition — With Tulja Bhavani at Tuljapur and Renuka at Mahur, and Saptashringi at Vani counted as the half. This is a third enumeration, distinct from the eighteen of the stotra and from the fifty-one of the tantric lists, and it is the one most pilgrims in Maharashtra mean when they count
• The local mahatmya of the town tells that the goddess killed an asura named Kolhasura here, and reads the town's name from him. — Karavīra Māhātmya — a local māhātmya of the town — A regional text glorifying Karavira, commonly said to be attached to a Purana, though its date, recension and parent text could not be established here. It is sthala literature and is labelled as that; it is not a Mahapurana, and this story is not the Devi Mahatmya's, which localises nothing at Kolhapur
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The eighteen carry no limb assignments. Three eyes are widely assigned to Kolhapur, from the separate fifty-one-peetha convention, and no classical passage making that assignment was located here — nor is Kolhapur securely in that list at all, which is itself part of the identity question above
• On three consecutive evenings twice a year the setting sun enters a western opening and falls on the image, reaching higher each evening. — Observance of the shrine (Kiraṇotsava) — A fixed opening tracks the sun's declination, so the evenings recur near the same dates each year — in early November and around the turn of January into February — and can shift by about a day between years, and depend on a clear western sky. The dates circulate identically across many accounts and no announcement from the body that administers the temple was reached here, so the windows are given and the exact evenings are not

Counted among

• The Shakti Peethas — Sati's body fell across the subcontinent — and the tradition has never agreed on how many pieces, or on how many shrines.

Questions to explore

• Her name is Lakshmi's, her lion is Durga's and there is a linga above her crown. Is Ambabai one goddess the traditions describe differently, or two who were joined at some point nobody recorded?
• Maharashtra counts three and a half seats and the stotra counts eighteen and the tantras count fifty-one, and Kolhapur is in the first two but not clearly the third. What does it mean for a place to be a peetha in one tradition's arithmetic and not another's?
• The sun reaches her over three evenings through an opening someone had to build for it. How would the builders have known where to put it?