Kamadevaकामदेव

Kamadeva is the god of desire, and his equipment is the best known in Indian iconography: a bow of sugarcane, a bowstring of honeybees, and five arrows tipped with flowers — the lotus, the ashoka, the mango blossom, the jasmine and the blue lotus. He rides a parrot and his banner carries the makara.

He is Kama, Manmatha (the churner of minds), Madana (the intoxicator), Kandarpa, Pushpabana (the flower-arrowed), and — after what happened to him — Ananga, the bodiless.

The story everybody knows is his destruction. The gods needed a son of Shiva to lead them against the demon Taraka, and Shiva was in meditation and not to be disturbed. Kama was sent to make him desire Parvati. He drew the bow; Shiva opened his third eye; and Kama was ash.

His wife Rati would not accept it, and Shiva relented — partly. Kama was restored without a body. He is everywhere and has no form, which the tradition presents as mercy and which reads at least as easily as a sentence.

But the interesting thing about Kamadeva is what he was before he was a cupid. In the Rigveda's most famous hymn on origins, kāma is not a boy with a bow. It is the first movement in the mind of the one, prior to gods and to existence itself — and the distance between that verse and the sugarcane bow is one of the longest a figure travels in this encyclopedia.

The Nasadiya Sukta. Rigveda 10.129, the hymn on creation, describes a state in which there was neither existence nor non-existence, neither death nor deathlessness, only the One breathing windlessly by itself. And then:

kāmas tad agre sam avartatādhi manaso retaḥ prathamaṃ yad āsīt — desire arose in the beginning, which was the first seed of mind.

That is kāma at the start of the tradition: not a person, not a god with weapons, but the first stirring — the thing that has to happen before anything else can. The Apas and Purusha pages carry the rest of that hymn.

The Atharvaveda's Kama. Book 9, hymn 2, goes further and is startling: Kama is addressed as a power greater than the gods, older than them, first-born, whom neither gods nor fathers nor men equal. He is asked to destroy rivals, and he is praised in terms the Vedic corpus reserves for supreme beings.

There is no cupid anywhere in this material.

The narrowing. By the epic and Puranic period kāma has become a person with a bow, and one of the four puruṣārthas — the four legitimate aims of human life, with dharma, artha and moksha. The Kamasutra takes its name from that sense, and its subject is far broader than its reputation: it is a treatise on the cultivated life of which sexual conduct is one section.

The deity's parentage varies. He is Brahma's mind-born son in several accounts — produced from the creator's own mind at the moment creation needed continuing, which preserves something of the older sense. In the Bhagavata he is reborn as Pradyumna, son of Krishna and Rukmini.

Kalidasa. The Kumarasambhava gives the classical treatment of the burning — canto three, which is among the most admired passages in Sanskrit poetry, and canto four, Rati's lament, which is a set piece of grief that later poets worked against for a thousand years.

And a doctrinal problem. Desire is simultaneously the first principle of creation, one of the four aims of life, and the root of bondage that renunciant traditions exist to cut. Hinduism never resolved this, and Kamadeva is where the unresolved version stands with a bow in his hand.

The bow and the arrows. The most charming armoury in Indian religion, and every element of it is chosen.

• The bow is sugarcane — sweet, jointed, and something you consume.
• The string is a line of honeybees, which hum and which sting.
• The arrows are five flowers, each assigned to one of the five senses, so that desire enters by every available door. The commonest list is the lotus, the ashoka, the mango blossom, the jasmine and the blue lotus, and their effects are named in the poetic manuals — bewildering, inflaming, parching, stupefying, killing.

The parrot. His mount, and the bird of speech and of repetition.

The makara banner. The sea-creature on his flag, from which he is Makaradhvaja. The makara is also the vahana of Ganga and of Varuna, and its association with water and with fertility is old.

Young, and richly dressed. He is handsome and ornamented and has none of the ash, weapons or terror of the great gods.

With Rati and Vasanta. Almost always accompanied: Rati, his wife, and Vasanta, spring, who travels with him and prepares the ground.

In temple sculpture. He appears on gateway and wall programmes across India — at Khajuraho, Konark, Belur and Halebidu — and the madanika and salabhanjika bracket figures of Hoysala and Chalukya temples belong to his register if not to his cult.

And nowhere, after the burning. The theologically exact depiction of Ananga is no depiction at all, and the tradition did not attempt one.

Kama / Kamadeva. The god of desire.

Manmatha, Madana, Kandarpa, Smara, Pushpabana, Makaradhvaja, Ananga. His principal names, and each carries a reading: the churner of minds, the intoxicator, the flower-arrowed, the bodiless.

Kama in the Rigveda and Atharvaveda. The cosmogonic principle and the power greater than the gods. Discussed in Origins, and effectively a different deity.

Pradyumna. Kamadeva reborn as the son of Krishna and Rukmini, abducted as an infant by the demon Shambara, raised by Mayavati — who is Rati in the same rebirth — and who kills Shambara and marries her. One of the odder arrangements in the Puranas, and it is the tradition's way of restoring his body after all. In Pancharatra theology Pradyumna is one of the four vyuhas, which places Kama, remarkably, inside the highest Vaishnava metaphysics. The Shesha page carries the vyuha scheme.

Kamakhya. The great Assam goddess's name is glossed in one tradition as the place where Kama regained his form — kāma-ākhyā, named for desire. Her page carries the shrine and its own far more consequential material; the etymology is one reading among several.

Bhandasura. Not a form but a consequence: in the Lalitopakhyana, the demon Bhandasura is generated from Kama's ashes by Shiva's own act, and grows into the enemy that Lalita Tripurasundari manifests to destroy. The Varahi page carries that war. Burning desire, in that text, produces something considerably worse.

Not Kama the purushartha. The aim of life is a category; Kamadeva is a person. Related and distinct.

Not Krishna as Madana Mohana. "He who bewitches the god of love" is an epithet of Krishna, and it works by ranking him above Kamadeva.

The burning. The one story, told in the Shiva Purana, the Matsya Purana, and definitively by Kalidasa.

The demon Taraka has a boon that only a son of Shiva can kill him, and Shiva — after Sati's death — is in meditation and has no interest in a wife. Parvati is undertaking austerities to win him and is getting nowhere. The gods, desperate, send Kama.

Kalidasa's account is exact and merciless. Spring arrives out of season; the forest flowers; Kama takes his position behind a tree; Parvati approaches with an offering; Shiva's attention wavers for an instant — and then he understands what is happening, and the third eye opens, and there is a flash, and there is ash.

Rati's lament. Canto four of the Kumarasambhava, and one of the great passages of Sanskrit grief. Rati, waking to find her husband a smear of ash, speaks to him, reproaches Vasanta for surviving, and prepares to enter fire. A voice from the sky stops her: he will be restored when Shiva marries Parvati.

The restoration, and its terms. Shiva relents — and gives him back without a body. Anaṅga. Visible to Rati alone in some tellings; present everywhere and in no form, in others.

The tradition offers this as a boon: unbodied, he is unconfined, and desire is therefore in everything. It is worth noticing that this is also exactly what a punishment would look like, and that the tradition does not choose. Being everywhere and nowhere is not obviously better than being somewhere.

Why it had to happen. The story's logic is airtight and worth following. Taraka can only be killed by Shiva's son. Shiva will not produce one while he is in meditation. Only desire can interrupt meditation. Desire must therefore be sent in, and destroyed by what it interrupts — and the son is duly born, and Murugan kills Taraka. Kama is destroyed by a mechanism he was required to set in motion. The Murugan and Parvati pages carry the sequel.

And the parallel the tradition invites. Shiva burns Kama for causing him to desire — and later, in the Mohini episode, Shiva desires and pursues, and Ayyappa is born of it. The tradition tells both and places them where they can be compared, and it does not pretend the second does not complicate the first.

Holi, in the south, is his. This is the page's most useful practical fact. The Holi bonfire has two different stories depending on where you are:

• In the north, it commemorates Holika, burnt while Prahlada survives — the Narasimha cycle.
• In Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the same fire is Kamadahana — the burning of Kama — and the festival is Kama Dahanam or Kaman Pandigai. An effigy of Kamadeva is burnt, and in several traditions Rati's lament is sung before it.

Two entirely different stories attached to the same bonfire on the same night across one country, and most people know only the one local to them.

Vasant Panchami. The opening of spring, and the beginning of his season. In some regional traditions the day is explicitly his and Rati's.

Madana Trayodashi / Madanotsava. The spring festival of Kama described in classical literature — Harsha's plays, the Ratnavali, and the poetic manuals — with swings, flowers, sport and license. It was a major courtly festival for centuries and has largely disappeared, surviving in fragments and in regional spring observances.

In marriage rites. He is invoked in the Hindu wedding at points, and in the domestic literature concerning conjugal life.

At Kamakhya, by way of the etymology; see her page.

No temple cult to speak of. A handful of shrines and no tradition of daily worship.

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

Almost none, and the absence is explicable: a deity who is defined by having no body is not an obvious candidate for an image in a sanctum.

Kameshwara shrines. The commonest trace — not temples to Kama but to Shiva as Kameshwara, lord of desire, which is a different dedication and frequently mistaken for one.

Kamakhya Temple, Guwahati (Assam) — by way of the etymology in which Kama recovered his form there. It is a great Shakta temple with its own enormous significance and it is not his; her page has it.

Kamadeva shrines in Kerala, including a few at which he is worshipped alongside Rati, and regional shrines in Karnataka and Odisha.

Konark (Odisha), Khajuraho (Madhya Pradesh), Belur and Halebidu (Karnataka) — where he appears in the wall programmes, and where the madanika bracket figures occupy his register. He is carved in many temples and worshipped in almost none, which is an unusual distribution.

Triyuginarayan (Rudraprayag district, Uttarakhand) — where tradition places Shiva's marriage to Parvati, and therefore the point at which Kama's restoration became due.

From the first movement to a boy with a bow. The trajectory is the page's real subject. In the Rigveda's creation hymn, kāma is the first seed of mind — what moves before anything exists to be moved. In the Atharvaveda he is greater than the gods. Twelve hundred years later he is an ornamented youth with a sugarcane bow, and the tradition's most memorable story about him is that he was burnt for doing his job.

The Vishwakarma page describes a comparable narrowing — a cosmogonic all-maker becoming a craftsman. Kama's is the steepest in this encyclopedia.

A god the tradition could not decide about. Desire is the origin of creation, one of the four legitimate aims of life, and the root of bondage — three positions held simultaneously by the same religion, in texts that were read by the same people. Kamadeva is where the contradiction is personified, and the burning is what a tradition does with a figure it cannot place: it destroys him, and then cannot do without him, and restores him in a form that resolves nothing.

Ananga, read honestly. Being bodiless is offered as a gift. It is also the condition of being unable to be met, refused, negotiated with or seen. The tradition says desire is now in everything; that is precisely what an ascetic would call the problem. The story is generally told as a happy ending, and it is at least as easily read as the worst possible outcome — and the texts, notably, never say which.

The mechanism, which is the cleverest part. Kama must interrupt Shiva so that a son can be born to kill Taraka. Only desire can interrupt meditation. So desire is sent in and annihilated by the very meditation it succeeded in interrupting — and it succeeded, because the son is born. Kamadeva wins and is destroyed by winning, and the tradition built that structure deliberately.

And the bonfire nobody agrees about. On one night each spring, across India, the same fire is lit — and half the country is burning a demoness who tried to kill a child, and the other half is burning the god of love while his widow's lament is sung. That two such different stories sit on one observance, and that most Indians know only their own, is among the most useful things this encyclopedia can point out about how varied the tradition actually is beneath a shared calendar.