Obavva (18th c.) is from the Kannada honorific. Onake Obavva was the wife of a guard at Chitradurga Fort in Karnataka — when Hyder Ali's troops attempted to infiltrate the fort through a small opening (Kindi) while her husband was at lunch, *she single-handedly killed dozens of soldiers one by one as they crawled through, using only her wooden rice-pestle (onake). Died fighting when finally overwhelmed. A national symbol of Kannada courage.*
Honored in Karnataka's Onake Obavva Athletic Stadium and on government postage.
Obavva does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Obavva reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.