Parjanyaपर्जन्य

Parjanya is the rain cloud, and the rain, and the god who is both.

Three hymns of the Rigveda are addressed to him — 5.83, 7.101 and 7.102 — and the first of them is one of the finest short pieces of writing in the collection. It describes the monsoon breaking:

The winds blow forth, the lightnings fly, the plants shoot up, the heaven overflows. Food is born for the whole world when Parjanya quickens the earth with seed. He drives his rain before him like a charioteer lashing his horses with a whip; he strikes down the trees; the lion roars when he thunders; and everything that lives is afraid of him and glad.

His image throughout is a bull — bellowing, laying seed, making the plants pregnant. The hymns describe the rains as an act of generation and use the vocabulary directly and without euphemism, because for the people composing them the connection between rain and food was not a metaphor.

He is a god of one thing, and he does it completely. And then Indra — who also brings the rain, by killing the serpent who holds the waters back — takes the function over, and Parjanya recedes into a word for cloud.

Possibly the oldest thunder god in the family. Parjanya has long been compared with a cluster of Indo-European storm and thunder deities descending from a reconstructed \*Perkʷunos:

• Lithuanian Perkūnas
• Latvian Pērkons
• Slavic Perun
• Norse Fjörgyn — Thor's mother — and Fjörgynn

The comparison is old, it is repeated in most handbooks, and it is phonologically contested. Some Indo-Europeanists derive parjanya instead from a root meaning to sprinkle or fill, which would make the resemblance a coincidence. This encyclopedia states the equation as widely cited and not settled, which is where the evidence leaves it. What is not in dispute is that a thunder-and-rain deity of this general shape is common to the family, and that in most branches he is a major god.

In India he is not. Three hymns, against Indra's two hundred and fifty. The reason is straightforward: Indra took the office. The Vritra myth — the serpent who holds the waters in the mountain, killed by Indra with the vajra, releasing the rivers — is the Rigveda's central story, and it makes Indra the rain-bringer by conquest. Parjanya, who simply is the rain, had no way to compete with a narrative like that. In several hymns the two are not clearly distinguished, and parjanya is used as an epithet of Indra.

If the Perkʷunos equation holds, this is a striking case: the inherited thunder god of the Indo-Europeans arrived in India and was displaced by a newer war-god, exactly as Dyaus the sky father was. The two displacements are the same event seen twice.

Later. Parjanya survives as one of the twelve Adityas in the Puranic monthly scheme, presiding over a month with his attendant company of rishi, gandharva, apsara and the rest; as a name for the rain in classical poetry, including Kalidasa; and as a word. He has no Puranic biography, no cult and no descendants.

The frogs. Immediately after the Parjanya hymns in the seventh mandala stands RV 7.103, the celebrated frog hymn, which compares frogs croaking at the first rains to brahmins chanting at a sacrifice. Readers have argued for two centuries about whether it is reverent, humorous or satirical. Its placement next to Parjanya is not accidental — it is what happens when the rain arrives.

Parjanya was never depicted, and the hymns give a description built almost entirely out of sound and weather.

The bull. Vṛṣabha — the bull who roars, who bellows, who lays the seed. The single controlling image.

The chariot and the water-skin. He drives a chariot heavy with water and slits the water-skin (dṛti) so that it pours out; the low and the high places are made level.

The whip. Like a charioteer lashing his horses with a whip, he makes his messengers of rain appear. The lightning is the lash and the thunder is the crack of it.

Roaring, and the fear that follows. He thunders and strikes; the trees fall; the rakshasas are smitten; and — the detail that gives the hymn its authority — everything alive is frightened, including the people praising him.

Three forms. RV 7.101 speaks of three utterances or three forms of Parjanya, and of a bull among cows, and the passage is obscure. Commentators have read the three as the three seasons of rain, or as the three worlds, or as lightning, thunder and downpour. Nothing is settled.

No later imagery. He has no place in temple art. Where a rain deity is depicted in India it is Indra with the vajra, or the megha of poetry and painting, or Varuna with the makara. Parjanya has no visual tradition at all.

Parjanya the rain god. The three hymns.

Parjanya as an epithet of Indra. Used in the Rigveda itself, and one of the mechanisms of his absorption.

Parjanya the Aditya. One of the twelve in the Puranic monthly scheme, where each month has a solar deity with a company of six attendants. In that arrangement he presides over a month of the rains, which is the only sense in which he retains his function.

Parjanya as a common noun. In classical Sanskrit parjanya simply means a rain cloud, and this is the word's whole afterlife. Kalidasa and the Meghaduta tradition use it; so do the agricultural manuals.

Vrishti, Megha, Varsha. The words that displaced him in poetry and in ritual: rain, cloud, and the rainy season.

Indra as Parjanya. In the living folk material — the rain processions, the frog marriages, the village invocations for rain across the Gangetic plain and the Deccan — the deity asked is Indra, or the local goddess, or a naga. Parjanya's name is not used.

Not Varuna. Varuna is lord of the waters and of the ocean and was once the sky's sovereign; he is not a rain god in the Parjanya sense, and the two should be kept apart.

He has almost none. Parjanya is a god of a recurring natural event, not of episodes, and the Rigveda describes rather than narrates him.

What exists:

The bull and the earth. The rains as insemination — the bull that roars, lays seed in the plants, and makes the earth bear. The hymns say the earth bows down before him, the hoofed creatures rejoice, and the plants take every form. It is a fertility narrative told in the present tense, repeated every year, and the hymns are aware that this is what it is: RV 5.83.4 asks him to thunder, to lay the seed, to fly around with the water-laden chariot, and to draw the water-skin's mouth downward.

Three utterances. RV 7.101's obscure three-form passage, discussed above.

Parjanya and the frogs. RV 7.103, immediately following. The frogs, silent for a year, lift their voices when Parjanya speaks to them, and "one repeats the speech of the other, as a pupil repeats after his teacher", and they lie about croaking like brahmins at the over-night soma rite. Whether the hymn honours the frogs or mocks the priests has never been settled, and the ambiguity is probably deliberate.

And the absence. There is no Parjanya myth of rescue, of battle, of birth or of loss. His whole content is the arrival of the monsoon, which is the most consequential recurring event in Indian life and needs no story to be interesting.

No living cult under his name. Parjanya is not worshipped by name anywhere in India today.

What survives:

Srauta rain rites. The Kariri ishti, a rain-making offering prescribed in the srauta literature, invokes Parjanya alongside Indra, Agni and the Maruts. It is performed rarely and only where the full ritual tradition survives.

In Vedic recitation. The three hymns are chanted in the pathashala tradition, and RV 5.83 is a favourite for demonstration because of its quality.

Folk rain rites, without his name. India has a very large repertoire of rain-making observances — the frog marriage performed in several states during drought, the Varuna japa and Parjanya japa commissioned by temples and village councils, the dragging of a plough by women at night, processions of Indra's or the local goddess's image, and jal abhishek on a Shiva linga during a failed monsoon. These are living, widely practised, and directed at other deities.

In the Aditya scheme. Named in the Puranic list of the twelve monthly solar companies.

A note on drought rites. Rain-making observances are performed across India in years of failed monsoon and are of real social importance to the communities that keep them. DharmSetu records them as practice and makes no claim about their effect on rainfall.

In the language. The commonest thing anyone does with his name now is use it to mean a cloud.

None. Parjanya has no temple, no shrine and no image anywhere in India.

Where he can be encountered:

Vedic recitation schools, where his three hymns are chanted.

Srauta performance sites, where the Kariri rite is occasionally undertaken.

Sun temples, where the twelve Adityas of the monthly scheme are represented, though no figure is separately identifiable as Parjanya.

And, indirectly, every rain-related shrine in India — the Indra shrines within Dikpala schemes, the Varuna shrines at coastal temples, the naga shrines and sacred groves associated with water, and the enormous number of village goddess shrines where rain is asked for. None of them is his. All of them are doing his job.

The honest summary is the one that recurs across this tranche: the office survived and the officeholder did not.

The god of the one thing that matters. For an agricultural society on the Indian subcontinent, the arrival or failure of the monsoon is the single most consequential fact of the year, and it remains so. That the Rigveda has a god who is simply the rain, described with unusual precision and evident relief, is worth more attention than three hymns usually get.

Displaced by a better story. Parjanya lost to Indra, and the reason is instructive. Parjanya is the rain; Indra wins it, from a serpent, in a fight, with a weapon. A deity who performs a natural process has nothing to narrate; a deity who defeats an enemy has a myth that can be told, elaborated, painted and recited. Narrative is a competitive advantage among gods, and the Rigveda's own pantheon is the evidence.

Set beside Dyaus, displaced by the same rival, the pattern is clear: the inherited Indo-European sky and thunder deities both lost their position in India to a warrior god with a good story, and both survive as words.

Weather, observed. The Parjanya and Marut hymns together contain the best writing about the monsoon in ancient Indian literature — the wind, the dust, the darkness, the lightning, the noise, the water-skin cut open, the plants coming up, the frogs. The poets were describing something they had waited for. Nothing else in the Rigveda has quite that quality of relief.

Fear and gratitude together. Everything alive is afraid of Parjanya, and everything alive depends on him, and the hymns say both in consecutive lines without attempting to reconcile them. This is the same structure that governs Rudra, the Maruts and the fierce goddesses, and it is one of the oldest and most durable habits of Indian religious thought: the dangerous thing and the sustaining thing are the same thing, and pretending otherwise would be a lie about the weather.

And a name that became a noun. Whatever the Perkʷunos argument decides, Parjanya's fate in India is settled. He is a word for a cloud, used by poets who have no idea they are naming a god. That is a smaller ending than Perun's — who was still being thrown into the Dnieper in 988 — but it is a very Indian one: nothing was destroyed, and nothing was remembered either.