Bhagaभग

Bhaga is the one who gives out shares.

His name is a common noun: bhaga, from the root bhaj, to divide, to distribute, to apportion. It means a portion, a share, an allotment — and by an easy extension, the good fortune of getting a good one.

He is an Aditya, one of the six of Rigveda 2.27, and he has no hymn of his own. His most substantial appearance is RV 7.41, a morning hymn calling Agni, Indra, Mitra-Varuna, the Ashvins, Bhaga, Pushan and Brahmanaspati at daybreak, in which he is addressed at length: bhagaḥ praṇetā bhaga it satyarādhāḥ — Bhaga is the leader; Bhaga is the true bestower. May we, invoking Bhaga, become the possessors of Bhaga. The hymn ends by asking that Bhaga come to us.

He is blind. His eyes were destroyed when Rudra broke up Daksha's sacrifice, in the same episode that knocked out Pushan's teeth, and neither injury was ever repaired.

And he is, by a very long way, the most consequential word in this encyclopedia. From bhaga come bhagya, fortune; saubhagya, good fortune and a wife's auspicious state; and — through the adjective bhagavat, "possessing bhaga" — Bhagavan and Bhagavati, the ordinary Indian words for God and Goddess, and the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bhagavata Purana.

The same word, in another branch of the family, became бог — the Slavic word for God.

An Indo-European word for God. The comparative evidence here is exceptionally clean.

• Old Persian baga, Avestan baγa — "god", "lord". It appears in royal inscriptions and in personal names; Baghdad derives from bagha-dāta, god-given.
• Slavic *bogъ — бог, the word for God in Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Polish and the rest, along with bogatyj (rich, "having a share") and ubogij (poor, "without a share").
• Phrygian Bagaios.

The common ancestor meant something like the apportioner or the share, and in the Iranian and Slavic branches it simply became the word for a god. In India it did not — India kept deva — but it produced the honorific Bhagavat, which is what an Indian devotee actually says.

So an obscure Vedic deity of allotment gave two enormous language families their principal word for the divine, and the semantic route was the same in each: the one who gives out shares became the one who has everything to give.

The six bhagas. Classical Vaishnava theology formalised this. The Vishnu Purana defines bhaga as a set of six qualities — sovereignty, strength, fame, beauty or prosperity, knowledge, and dispassion — and Bhagavan as the one in whom all six are complete. Every use of the word Bhagavan in a Vaishnava text is, technically, invoking that definition.

The other sense. Bhaga in Sanskrit also means the womb or vulva, a sense present from the Vedic period and derived from the same root through the idea of the portion or the source. It accounts for a set of otherwise puzzling terms — the Srividya nitya Bhagamalini, and the Tantric usages — and it is why the word's field includes fertility and generative fortune as well as allotment. The lexicographers record it plainly and so does this page.

The Aditya function. Bhaga's office within the Aditya scheme is distribution: what each person receives is his to assign, and the hymns ask him to make the assignment favourable. This is not the later karma mechanism, in which one's portion is earned; it is allotment by a god, and the two ideas coexist uncomfortably in Indian thought for a long time.

Where he went. He is one of the twelve Adityas, presides over the nakshatra Purva Phalguni, and otherwise dissolves entirely into vocabulary.

No Vedic image, and only one memorable attribute in the whole tradition: he cannot see.

Blind. Bhaga's eyes were destroyed at Daksha's sacrifice. The detail is fixed and is repeated wherever he is named in the Puranic material, and it pairs him permanently with Pushan, who lost his teeth in the same event.

A tempting parallel, and a caution. European readers reach immediately for Fortuna, the Roman goddess of chance, who is blindfolded because fortune does not look at who it favours. The parallel is neat and the Indian sources do not make it. Bhaga is not blind because fortune is blind; he is blind because Rudra was not invited to a sacrifice. The moral reading is a modern import and should be labelled as one.

As an Aditya. One of twelve identical figures at Konark, Modhera and Martand.

In the nakshatra scheme. Purva Phalguni is his, and its symbols are the front legs of a bed or a hammock — associated with pleasure, procreation and rest. Together with Aryaman's Uttara Phalguni it forms the pair of "bed" nakshatras, and the two Adityas hold them side by side.

No cult image anywhere.

Bhaga the Aditya. One of the six of RV 2.27; one of the twelve of the Puranic lists; oṃ bhagāya namaḥ among the twelve solar names.

Bhagavan and Bhagavati. Not forms of him, but words made from his name, and by an enormous margin his real afterlife. Bhagavan is used of Vishnu, of Shiva, of the Buddha (the Bhagavā of the Pali canon), of the Jina in Jain usage, and of any revered teacher. Bhagavati is used of the Goddess throughout India and is the standard word for her in Kerala, where a Bhagavati temple is the commonest kind of temple there is.

Bhagya, saubhagya, subhaga, durbhaga. Fortune, good fortune, the fortunate and the unfortunate. Saubhagya is among the most consequential words in Indian women's ritual life, denoting the auspicious married state, and it governs a whole class of vows including Vata Savitri and Karva Chauth.

Bhagamalini. One of the fifteen Nitya goddesses of Srividya, whose name carries the other sense of the word.

Bhaga as a title in Iran and Slavia. Baga and bogъ, discussed above.

Not Bhagirath, not Bhargava, not Bhaga the asura. Similar-looking names with different derivations. Bhagiratha, who brought the Ganga down, is from bhagīratha; Bhargava is a patronymic from Bhrigu.

The blinding. At Daksha's sacrifice, from which Rudra was excluded, the rite was destroyed. In the standard accounts Bhaga's eyes were put out and Pushan's teeth knocked out, along with other injuries to the assembled gods. When the sacrifice was afterwards restored and completed, the injuries were not undone — in some versions Bhaga is given the ability to see through Mitra's eyes, which is a compensation rather than a repair.

The episode belongs to the great Sati and Daksha cycle, which this encyclopedia treats on the Shiva and Devi pages. What belongs here is that the god of fortune was permanently damaged in a quarrel he had no part in, which is either a very sharp piece of theology or an accident of narrative, and the tradition never says which.

The morning hymn. RV 7.41's picture of Bhaga is his only positive portrait: he is called at daybreak with the other morning gods, he is praṇetṛ, the one who leads forward, and satyarādhāḥ, whose giving is real. The hymn asks — and the phrasing is worth noticing — that those who invoke Bhaga may become possessors of Bhaga, which is to say: may the god of shares give us a share of himself.

A god with no story. Beyond the blinding, Bhaga has none. He does not marry, fight, travel, curse or fall. The one thing that ever happened to him was being hurt.

And the word's own story. Which is the better narrative. A minor deity of allotment, with no hymn and no cult, was so completely absorbed into the language that a Bengali saying Bhagavan, a Malayali saying Bhagavati, a Russian saying bog and a Buddhist reciting Bhagavā are all, etymologically, naming him. Very few gods have been forgotten so thoroughly while being said so often.

Bhaga is not worshipped by name anywhere in India today, and his own cult is entirely extinct.

What survives:

In the morning invocation. RV 7.41 belongs to the Prataranuvaka, the long morning litany of the soma sacrifice, and to the morning recitations; where the full srauta rite is performed, Bhaga is called at dawn as the hymn prescribes.

In Surya Namaskara. Oṃ bhagāya namaḥ, one of the twelve names.

In the nakshatra system. Purva Phalguni is his, and astrologers working with it are within his jurisdiction. It is among the nakshatras considered for marriage and for matters of pleasure and progeny.

Every time anyone says Bhagavan. Which is the honest answer and is not a joke: the honorific is used hundreds of millions of times a day across India, and in Kerala the word for the local goddess and for her temple is Bhagavati.

Saubhagya vratas. The class of vows kept by married women for the auspicious state — Vata Savitri, Karva Chauth, Mangala Gauri, Hartalika Teej — all take their name and their category from his word. He is not the deity addressed in any of them.

In the shraddha and dana literature. The vocabulary of the share, the portion and the allotment — bhāga — governs how offerings are divided among the ancestors and among brahmins, and the technical term is his.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes.

None under his own name.

Where his word is over the door:

Bhagavati temples of Kerala. The commonest form of temple in the state — Kodungallur Bhagavathy, Chottanikkara, Attukal, Chettikulangara, and several thousand kavu shrines. The goddess in them is Bhadrakali, Durga or a local deity; the word is his.

Bhagavan and Bhagavati in temple names across India — every Bhagavan temple, every Bhagavati kshetram.

Sun temples. As one of twelve Adityas at Konark, Modhera and Martand.

Nakshatra shrines, where Purva Phalguni is represented.

The conclusion is the one this tranche keeps arriving at from a new direction. Bhaga has no temple; his name is on more temples than almost any other word in India.

The god who became a word for God. This is the whole of Bhaga's importance and it is enormous. A minor Aditya of apportionment, with no hymn, no image, no cult and one injury, supplied:

• Bhagavan and Bhagavati, the standard Indian words for God and Goddess, used by Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas, Buddhists and Jains alike;
• bhagya and saubhagya, fortune and the auspicious state;
• the titles of the *Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana*;
• and, in another branch of the family, the Slavic бог.

When a tradition's word for the divine means "the one who has a portion to give", it has said something about what it thinks a god is for. Not the strongest, not the truest, not the highest — the one with something to distribute.

Allotment against earning. Bhaga's function sits awkwardly beside the karma doctrine that later dominates Indian thought, and the awkwardness is worth naming. If a god apportions, then what one has is a gift; if action ripens, then what one has is earned. Indian religion never fully chose, and the tension is visible in ordinary speech, where bhagya (allotted fortune) and karma (earned consequence) are used interchangeably for the same thing by the same speaker in the same sentence.

The blind god of fortune, and a caution. The parallel with Fortuna is irresistible and unfounded. Bhaga is blind because of a quarrel about a sacrifice, not because chance is impartial. The moralised reading is European and modern, and this encyclopedia flags it rather than repeating it — the more so because it is exactly the kind of neat cross-cultural equation that gets copied without checking.

Damaged and kept. With Pushan, blinded and de-toothed in the same episode and never repaired, and with Savitr and his golden hands, Bhaga belongs to a small set of Vedic gods who carry permanent injuries. That a tradition preoccupied with wholeness kept three maimed gods in office, adjusting the ritual rather than the god, is a genuinely unusual thing about it.

And a word every Indian owns. Bhagya is spoken by people who have never opened a Veda, in a dozen languages, about their own lives. The deity is entirely gone. The idea he stood for — that what you get was given out, and might have been given differently — is one of the most widely held convictions on the subcontinent.