The verse places the third of the eighteen at a town it calls Pradyumna, and the circuit has long read that as Pandua in Hooghly district, on the main line north-west of Kolkata. A visitor who goes there will find no temple of the goddess. What stands is the Pandua Minar, a tapering five-storey tower of the medieval Bengal period, and the ruins of a large brick mosque beside it, both protected monuments in the care of the Archaeological Survey of India. That absence is the entry, and it compounds a second one: this is also the member of the eighteen whose place-identification rests on the least. The goddess's name is read as the chain or the girdle, and the little that is said about her is said by the stotra line and by the pilgrimage tradition that carries it, with no local temple chronicle, inscription or sthala-purana of her own reached from this session to stand behind it.

Claims, and where they come from

• The third of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration is at a place the verse calls Pradyumna, and the goddess named there is Shrinkhala. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Opening verse, third name, between Kanchi and Krauncha Pattana. Note what the line does and does not do: it gives a place-name, Pradyumna, and a goddess. It does not give a district, a river or a landmark, and the modern location of the peetha depends entirely on identifying that place-name with a town. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional, not established
• No temple of this goddess stands at Pandua; the monuments there are a minar and a mosque in the care of the Archaeological Survey of India. — Modern record and the present state of the site — The tower is a tapering five-storey brick structure of the medieval Bengal period whose upper part was lost and later restored; the mosque beside it is a long, many-domed brick building carried on stone pillars. Dates given for the tower range across half a century and the sources consulted here do not agree, so none is printed. A visit to this site is a visit to protected monuments, not a darshan
• A tradition holds that a temple of Shrinkhala stood here and was destroyed, and that its stone was reused in the monuments that stand now. — Received tradition; not established archaeologically — The stone pillars in the mosque are what the reuse argument rests on, and reused stone is common in the brick architecture of this region for reasons that do not by themselves establish where a given pillar came from. No archaeological determination either way was reached from this session. This corpus records the claim as a claim, asserts nothing about it, and notes that the question is contested in the present and should be approached as contested
• 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. A stomach and a girdle both circulate for this site, drawn from the separate fifty-one-peetha convention, and accounts move between the two without noticing that they are different things. Whether Pandua appears in that literature at all could not be established here, so no limb is asserted
• Observances in this goddess's name are held, but not at the site. — Modern record — A puja in her name has been kept in Kolkata since 2022, on the new moon, with the goddess worshipped in a formless aspect. It is recorded here because a reader will meet the report and may take it to mean that worship has resumed at the peetha. It has not; the observance is held elsewhere, and the organisers are a campaigning body rather than a temple

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

• The verse names a place called Pradyumna and nothing else. What actually connects that name to a town in Hooghly, and has anyone ever shown the connection rather than repeated it?
• There is no shrine here to walk into, and there has not been for a very long time. Does a peetha end when its shrine does, or is the ground itself the seat?
• Her name means the chain, or the girdle. Is that a description of what fell here, of how she is bound, or of something else the tradition has stopped explaining?