Maiya ('little mother') is the mother-goddess of the Dangaura Tharu, created by Gurbaba to be his wife once the earth had been raised. From this first couple, the Tharu say, all men and women descend. Under her by-name Debi ('the Goddess') she is, in Krauskopff's analysis, the immanent and active divinity present in the village and among its people, standing in deliberate contrast to the remote and transcendent Gurbaba whose seat lies far off at Harikabilas. She is thus at once a cosmogonic ancestress and the living tutelary goddess of the settlement.