Marutsमरुत्

The Maruts are the storm gods of the Rigveda, and they are the only deity in the collection who is essentially and irreducibly plural. There is no chief Marut. They arrive together, act together, are addressed together, and the hymns describe them with a vocabulary of simultaneity — born at the same moment, of the same age, of one mind, none first and none last.

They are young. This is emphasised more than anything else about them: yuvānaḥ, youths; marya, young men. They wear gold on their chests and gold rings at their ankles, carry axes and spears, and are described as glittering, noisy, boastful and beautiful. They ride a chariot drawn by spotted deer, they split the mountains, they knock down the trees, and the earth shakes when they come.

What they bring is rain. That is their function and their justification: the terror of the storm and the water that follows are one event, and the hymns move between the two without embarrassment.

They stand beside Indra in the fight with Vritra — his epithet marutvat, "having the Maruts", is one of his commonest. But they are not simply his retinue: in one of the most remarkable passages in the Rigveda, they and Indra fall out, and the quarrel has to be settled.

Thirty-three hymns are addressed to them, and another seven to them with Indra. After the Vedic period they effectively disappear.

Sons of Rudra and Prishni. The Rigveda calls them Rudrāḥ and Rudriyāḥ, sons of Rudra, and their mother is Prishni, the dappled one — a cow, or the speckled storm-cloud, which is the same image. Being Rudra's sons connects them to the deity who becomes Shiva, and Shaiva tradition retains the link: the eleven Rudras of later enumeration are a residue of the Marut host.

The Puranic re-derivation. The Puranas supply an entirely different and much better-known origin. Diti, mother of the daityas, having lost her sons to Indra, sought a son who would kill him and undertook a long vow. Indra found her asleep with her foot in the wrong place, entered her womb and cut the embryo with his thunderbolt into seven pieces, and each piece into seven again — forty-nine. Each cried out, and Indra said "mā rodīḥ" — do not weep — and made them his companions. From that the name Marut is derived.

The etymology is folk etymology and the story is a later attempt to explain a name and a number. Its interest is that it converts a troop of storm gods into Indra's adopted brothers, which resolves by narrative the tension the Rigveda leaves open.

How many. The hymns say thrice sixty — a hundred and eighty (RV 8.96.8) — and also seven, and also three times seven, and also forty-nine in seven troops of seven. The number is not fixed because the object is a troop, and a troop is counted approximately.

The war-band reading. A substantial line of scholarship, associated with Stig Wikander and developed since, reads the Maruts as the divine model of the *marya* — the band of young unmarried warriors, initiated as a group, who feature across early Indo-European societies. The evidence is internal: their age, their equality, their gold ornaments, their noise, their travelling together, their association with the storm and with cattle-raiding. The reading is well supported and is the most useful single key to the hymns.

Comparative. No clean Indo-European cognate is agreed. The proposed link to Latin Mars/Mavors is old and remains unproven; the marya institution, rather than the deity name, is where the comparative purchase lies.

Like most Vedic deities the Maruts were never sculpted, and what survives is the hymns' description — which is unusually concrete and unusually visual.

Gold, everywhere. Golden helmets, golden breastplates (rukma) worn on the chest, golden anklets, gold at the wheels. They shine and they are meant to be seen shining.

Weapons. Spears (ṛṣṭi) on their shoulders, axes, and lightning. Their bows are mentioned rarely; they are a close-quarters, showy, glittering troop rather than archers.

The spotted deer. Their chariot is drawn by pṛṣatī, dappled does — a strikingly light and un-martial team for a war-band, and one of the details that makes the Maruts memorable.

Noise as an attribute. They roar, they sing, they shout; the hymns say the mountains bow and the trees give way at the sound. They are also singers — the hymns call them the singers of the sky — and the noise of the storm and the noise of a chorus are the same thing to the poets.

Rodasi in the chariot. A goddess rides with them, standing in the car. Her presence is unexplained and rare: an armed young band with a woman travelling among them, described without disapproval.

Later. In Puranic and temple art the Maruts have essentially no iconography. Where they appear, it is as a generic group of divine attendants; the eleven Rudras of the Shaiva enumeration carry whatever visual afterlife they have.

The Rudras. Rudriyāḥ and Rudrāḥ in the hymns; and the eleven Rudras of the classical thirty-three-god scheme (eight Vasus, eleven Rudras, twelve Adityas, Indra and Prajapati) are the Maruts' most durable descendant. When a later text says "the eleven Rudras", the Marut host is what it is counting.

Marutvat / Marutvan. Not a form of theirs but of Indra — "accompanied by the Maruts" — and one of his standard epithets. The Marutvatīya is a section of the midday soma pressing named for it.

The Ganas. Shiva's gaṇas, the troop of attendants headed by Nandi, occupy the same structural position in Shaiva religion that the Maruts occupy in the Rigveda: an anonymous, plural, noisy, youthful band belonging to the Rudra-Shiva figure. The continuity is not a formal identification but it is not an accident either.

Vayu and Vata. The wind's function passes to Vayu, who absorbs what the Maruts had and outlives them. See his page.

Marut as a common noun. In classical Sanskrit marut simply means wind, and that is the word's whole afterlife in the language.

The Maruts of the Ramayana. The Bala Kanda retells the Diti story, and Puranic literature keeps them as a fixed group of forty-nine attached to Indra — which is where the number forty-nine, absent from the Rigveda, comes from.

The quarrel with Indra. RV 1.165, 1.170 and 1.171 form a dialogue that is among the most extraordinary passages in the Rigveda. Indra meets the Maruts and demands to know why they have come; they answer that they are his allies and ask why he is alone. He boasts that he killed Vritra by his own strength. They reply, in effect, that he did not — that they were there, and that what he did he did with them. Agastya, the poet, is caught between the two parties, having begun a sacrifice for the Maruts and then diverted it to Indra, and the hymns end in an explicit reconciliation: Indra concedes the Maruts their share and asks that the quarrel be forgotten.

A hymn in which a god is contradicted to his face about his own great deed, and gives ground, is not what most people expect of scripture. It is also, on the war-band reading, exactly what one would expect: a dispute over the division of spoils between a chief and his men, settled by acknowledging the men's part.

The Vritra fight. In most accounts the Maruts accompany Indra, sing to strengthen him, and are present at the killing. In a few they abandon him at the moment of the fight and return afterwards, and the hymns reproach them for it. Both versions are in the collection.

Diti's forty-nine. Told above, from the Puranas.

The Maruts and rain. They are asked, over and over, to open the cloud — the bull that has water in his udder — and the hymns describe with precision the moment before a monsoon storm: the wind rising, the dust, the darkness, the noise, the trees bending, and then the rain. Whatever else the Marut hymns are, they are the best writing about weather in early Indian literature.

No death, no defeat, no fall. The Maruts have no downfall narrative. They simply stop being mentioned. That is worth noting as a fact about them: unlike Indra, whose decline the later tradition dramatises, the Maruts leave no record of their own disappearance.

In the Vedic rite. The Maruts receive the Māruvatīya offerings at the midday pressing of the soma sacrifice, and share the third pressing. Their portion is real and is still offered in the srauta rituals performed by the small number of families in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra who maintain them — the Agnishtoma and the Athirathram both carry Marut offerings.

In rain rites. Where village and srauta rain-making rites survive, the Maruts are named alongside Parjanya and Indra. The Kariri offering of the srauta tradition is a rain rite; the Marut hymns are among its material.

No temple, no festival, no image. There is no Marut cult and there never was one outside the sacrifice. This is characteristic of the class of Vedic deities who did not make the transition to the temple: their worship was recitation and offering, and when the sacrifice contracted, they contracted with it.

Where they are still recited. The Marut hymns are part of the Rigveda and are therefore memorised and chanted in full by the traditional pathashala lineages, without regard to whether anyone worships their subject. This is an important and easily missed point about Vedic religion: the text survived the cult, and a hymn to a deity nobody has worshipped for two thousand years is still recited daily, syllable-perfect, by people trained to do it.

As the eleven Rudras. The one living context in which the Marut host is still addressed is the Shaiva Rudra liturgy and the invocation of the thirty-three gods, where the eleven Rudras are named as a class.

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

There are none, and there is no reason to expect any.

The Maruts belong entirely to the sacrificial layer of Indian religion. They were addressed in the fire ritual, they had no image, and they were absorbed or forgotten before the temple became the ordinary site of Hindu worship. The same is true of the Vishvedevas, the Rbhus, Apam Napat, and most of the deities described on the Vedic pages of this encyclopedia.

Where the Maruts can be encountered:

Srauta ritual sites. The Athirathram and Agnichayana performances in Kerala — at Panjal, Kundoor and elsewhere — and the srauta traditions maintained in parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra are the only settings in which Marut offerings are actually made. They are periodic and are not temples.

Shiva temples, indirectly. Wherever the Rudram is chanted — which is most large Shiva temples, daily — the eleven Rudras are invoked, and the Marut host is their ancestor. The rudrabhisheka is the commonest Indian context in which anything descended from the Maruts is said aloud.

Vedic pathashalas. The recitation schools of Varanasi, Tirupati, Pune, Kanchipuram, Guruvayur and Nashik preserve the hymns themselves. For this class of deity the pathashala is more nearly the temple than any building is.

See the Vayu page for the deity who inherited the wind, and the Shiva page for the Rudra line.

A god that is a group. Almost every deity in this encyclopedia is a person. The Maruts are a plurality that is never resolved into individuals — no names, no ranks, no leader, no first among them. The hymns insist on it: they are of one mind, of one age, born together. To worship the Maruts is to address a collective as such, and there is very little else like it in Indian religion. Whatever else the gaṇa, the saṅgha and the kula owe to this, the earliest Indian image of a body of equals is a storm.

A chief who can be answered back. The Indra dialogue is the passage that earns the Maruts their place. A hymn in which the greatest god of the collection claims sole credit and his companions publicly refuse the claim — and in which he then concedes — is a political text, and it records a view of authority as something that has to account for itself to the people who made it possible. That this is preserved in scripture rather than smoothed away is remarkable.

Terror and benefit as one event. The Maruts break the trees and bring the water. The hymns never separate the two or apologise for the first, and the poets ask the Maruts to be mṛḍayantaḥ, merciful, in the same breath as they admire the destruction. This is the same structure that later governs Rudra-Shiva and the fierce goddesses: the thing that is dangerous is the thing that sustains, and Indian religion has been unusually willing to say so.

The weather, observed. The Marut hymns contain the most exact description of the arrival of the monsoon in ancient Indian literature — the wind, the dust, the darkness, the noise, the bending trees, the rain. Whatever one thinks of the theology, the observation is real, and it is a reminder that the Rigveda was composed by people standing outside.

And a disappearance without a story. Indra's decline is narrated by the tradition itself. The Maruts have no such account: they are simply not mentioned any more. That silence is the ordinary fate of a Vedic deity, and it is worth registering when reading the confident later claim that Hinduism has changed only by accretion.