Ratiरति

Rati is what happened to the person standing next to the god who got burned.

Her husband is Kamadeva, desire — and the gods, needing Shiva to come out of his austerity and father a son who could kill Tarakasura, sent Kama to make him fall in love. Kama went, knowing what it would cost. He loosed the flower-arrow. Shiva opened his third eye and burned him to ash where he stood, and Rati was there.

What she did next is the reason she has a page.

In the fourth canto of Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava — one of the summits of Sanskrit poetry — Rati's lament runs for dozens of verses, and it is not a formality. She grieves, she describes the body that is no longer there, she prepares to follow him into fire, and she makes a case: her husband was sent; he did what the gods asked; he was obeying an order from the very beings who are now standing about looking sorry; and he was destroyed for it while they were not.

She is right, and the text knows she is right. What she gets is a concession, not a reversal: Kama will live, but without a body — Ananga, the bodiless — present everywhere and visible nowhere, and she will have him back in a later birth.

And she does. She is reborn as Mayavati, raised in the house of the asura Shambara; Kama is reborn as Pradyumna, Krishna's son, stolen at birth and given to the same household; and she recognises him, and tells him who they both are, and they go home together.

It is the only story in Hindu literature in which a widow is promised her husband back and actually gets him, and it is the reason Rati is not simply an attendant figure on somebody else's page.

The name is the act. Rati means pleasure, love-making, delight — she is, like Daksha and Dhruva, an abstraction wearing a person. Her presence in the pantheon is a piece of grammar: where Kama is desire, Rati is its satisfaction, and the pair only works as a pair.

Her birth. The Kalika Purana has her produced from the sweat of Daksha — or, in other tellings, from Brahma's — specifically so that Kama would have a wife, which is a candid admission that she was made for a role. The Daksha page counts her among his daughters in the reckonings that do.

The Kumarasambhava. Kalidasa, probably fourth or fifth century, and the burning of Kama is its third canto, Rati's lament its fourth. It is the treatment that fixed the story for everything afterwards — the Puranas that tell it later are, in places, following him. Her lament is studied as one of the great set-pieces of karuna rasa, the sentiment of grief, in Sanskrit poetics.

The Shiva and Matsya Puranas supply the frame: Tarakasura's boon that only a son of Shiva could kill him; Shiva's austerity after Sati's death; the gods' problem; Kama's mission. The Sati, Parvati and Murugan pages each carry a section of it.

Madana Dahana in the south. In Tamil, Telugu and Kannada tradition the burning of Kama is a distinct and named observance, and in parts of the south Holi is understood primarily as Kamadeva's burning rather than as Holika's. The Prahlada page carries the northern explanation of the same bonfire; that two entirely different stories are given for one fire, in one country, is worth knowing.

Mayavati and Pradyumna. The Harivamsa and the Bhagavata carry the sequel: the infant Pradyumna stolen by Shambara and thrown into the sea, swallowed by a fish, the fish caught and taken to Shambara's kitchen, and Mayavati — the cook — finding the child inside it, and knowing.

In the Kamashastra tradition, Rati appears as the presiding figure of the rati-shastra literature, and her name is used in the technical vocabulary of that field. That material is not reproduced here.

She is almost never alone, and she is easy to identify when you know what to look for.

With Kamadeva. The standard pair: a young man with a bow of sugarcane strung with bees and five flower-tipped arrows, and beside him a young woman, often with her hand on his shoulder or his arm around her. Both are conventionally beautiful in the fullest classical manner.

The parrot. Their vahana, shared — a green parrot, sometimes carrying them both, sometimes at their feet. The parrot is the single best identifying mark for the pair.

The mirror. Rati often holds one; sometimes a lotus, sometimes a fly-whisk.

On temple walls. The pair appears on torana arches, on doorframes, and in the mithuna and maithuna programmes of temples including Khajuraho, Konark and Modhera. A plain word about those: the erotic sculpture of those sites is a genuine and much-argued feature of medieval Indian temple architecture, its purposes are disputed among art historians, and this encyclopedia records that it exists and does not offer a single explanation for it.

In the burning scenes. Kalidasa's episode, painted: Shiva seated, the third eye opening, a figure dissolving into flame, and a woman falling. In Pahari and Rajput painting this is a favourite subject and the painters give her the whole of the emotional weight.

As Mayavati. In Bhagavata illustration: a woman in a kitchen with a fish, or presenting a child.

Distinguishing her. A beautiful couple with a parrot and a flower-bow are Kama and Rati. Without the bow, a woman with a parrot may be Meenakshi, Andal, or a generic nayika, and the parrot alone will not settle it.

Rati. Pleasure, delight, love-making.

Mayavati. Her rebirth in Shambara's house; also read as the one of illusion, which is what she uses on him.

Priti. In some accounts Kama has two wives, Rati and Priti (affection), and the pair are distinguished; in others Priti is simply another name for her.

Kamini, Ratipriya, Madanapriya. Epithets from the husband's name.

Kamadeva / Madana / Manmatha / Ananga. Her husband, with his own page here; Ananga, the bodiless, is the name he gets because of what happens to him in this story.

Vasanta. Spring, Kama's companion, who goes with him to Shiva's forest and who is the reason the season and the god are linked.

Not Rati the technical term of the Kamashastra and the rasa theory, where rati is the stable emotion underlying the erotic sentiment — the same word doing philosophical work.

Not Ratri, night, who is a Rigvedic goddess with her own page here and no connection. The two names are one letter apart and the confusion is common.

The burning. The gods need a son of Shiva. Shiva is in austerity and will not be moved. Kama is sent — and the texts are clear that he knew, and went. He waits for his moment, draws the sugarcane bow, and looses the arrow at the meditating god. Shiva's eyes open, and the third one with them, and Kama is ash.

Rati's lament. Kumarasambhava IV. She wakes from a faint into a world with a smear of ash in it. She speaks to him as though he could hear; she recalls what he looked like; she reproaches Spring for standing there; she asks why the fire took him and left her. And she puts the argument that the poem wants put: he was sent by the gods, he did their errand, and he alone paid.

She then prepares to enter fire after him, and is stopped by a voice from the sky, which tells her to wait.

This encyclopedia states plainly what that scene is and is not. Rati's intention to follow her husband into fire is a literary episode in a fifth-century poem, and it is not an endorsement of the practice later named after Sati — which is a separate figure with her own page here, whose death was also not that, and which is a criminal offence in India under the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, including its abetment and its glorification. Rati is stopped, and the poem's sympathy is entirely with her living.

The concession. Shiva's judgement, when it comes, is characteristic: he does not undo it. Kama will exist without a body — Ananga — which means desire is now everywhere and invisible, in everything, unlocatable. As an aetiology for why desire cannot be found and cannot be escaped, it is a good one, and Rati paid for it.

Finding him again. Reborn as Mayavati in the house of Shambara, she is given a child that the asura has stolen from Krishna and thrown into the sea, and that has come back to her inside a fish. She raises him. When he is grown she tells him she is not his mother — and who he is, and who she is. Pradyumna kills Shambara, and they leave together and are received at Dwarka.

The detail the story does not flinch from is that she raised him, and the Bhagavata has her explain herself carefully. It is an odd and rather brave piece of narrative and later tradition has mostly left it alone.

And the fire in the south. Every Holi, in much of southern India, the bonfire is Kama's — Kama Dahanam, the burning of desire — and Rati's lament is sung at it. In the north the same fire is Holika's. One country, one night, two unrelated deaths.

She is worshipped with her husband, and almost never apart from him.

Kama Dahanam / Madana Dahana. In Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the Holi bonfire is understood as Kamadeva's burning; effigies of Kama are made and burnt, songs of Rati's lament are sung, and in some places the following day is kept as the day Shiva relented. The Prahlada page carries the northern Holika explanation of the same night.

Vasant Panchami and the spring observances, where Kama and Rati belong to the season.

In marriage ritual. The couple is invoked in some regional wedding rites and in songs; auspicious depictions of them appear on wedding invitations, on torana hangings and on painted doorframes.

In temple sculpture, as above.

A note on what she is invoked for. Rati and Kamadeva are addressed in popular practice in connection with marriage, attraction and marital harmony. DharmSetu records this as religious practice and makes no claim about outcomes. It also states a boundary the module keeps: any rite advertised as making a specific named person desire someone, or as compelling another person's affection, falls squarely within the class of coercive practice this encyclopedia does not describe and does not assist with — and in several Indian states the advertising of such services is itself regulated. Consent is not a ritual variable.

In Sanskrit study. Her lament is set reading wherever Kumarasambhava is taught, which is in every serious Sanskrit curriculum in India.

She has no temple of her own, and shares the very few that Kamadeva has.

Kameshwara Temple, Kamyavan (Mathura district, Uttar Pradesh) — in the Braj circuit; among the handful of sites associated with Kamadeva.

Kamakhya (Guwahati, Assam) — the name is Kama's, and the tradition there is that Kamadeva recovered his body at that spot. A principal Shakti Peetha, and its own page.

Halebidu and Belur (Hassan district, Karnataka) — Hoysala temples with superb Kama-and-Rati bracket figures.

Khajuraho (Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh), Konark (Puri district, Odisha) and Modhera (Mehsana district, Gujarat) — where the pair appears in the sculptural programme. All three are UNESCO World Heritage Sites or on its tentative list, and all three are visited principally for architecture.

Suchindram and the southern temples where Madana Dahana is observed.

Dwarka (Devbhumi Dwarka district, Gujarat) — where Pradyumna and Mayavati are received; a Char Dham site.

Tripura Sundari's temples, where the kama vocabulary belongs to a different and initiatory tradition that this encyclopedia does not reproduce.

The honest summary: Rati's real monument is a poem, and it is more widely read than any of these buildings are visited.

She is the one who said it out loud. The gods had a problem, sent someone else to solve it, and watched him incinerated for doing exactly what they asked. Every deity present knew. Rati is the only one who says so, at length, in front of them, and Kalidasa gives her forty-odd verses to do it in. In a literature with a great many grieving women, she is not merely grieving — she is making an accusation, and the poem does not contradict her.

A concession is not justice, and the poem knows the difference. Kama is not restored. He is given a bodiless existence, which is a compromise that suits everyone except the two people it happened to, and Rati is told to wait. The tradition's most famous piece of divine forbearance-in-reverse ends not with a reversal but with a settlement, and a widow being asked to be patient. That the text lets her object first is what makes it worth reading.

Desire has no body because of this. The aetiology is elegant and it costs her everything: because Shiva burned Kama, desire is now Ananga — unlocatable, present in everything, impossible to point at and therefore impossible to avoid. A story about a god's anger becomes an explanation of why the thing he tried to destroy is now everywhere. It is the most efficient irony in the Puranas.

The only reunion. Hindu narrative promises reunion across births constantly and very rarely stages it. Rati gets Mayavati and Pradyumna — a recognition scene, a rescue and a departure, with the whole thing turning on a woman who raised the child she was waiting for and then explained herself. Nothing else in the corpus closes a loop like that.

And two fires on the same night. In the north the Holi bonfire is Holika; in the south it is Kama. Same country, same evening, same flame, two entirely unrelated dead. No authority has ever been asked to decide, because there is none — and both explanations are given with total conviction by the people giving them. If a reader wants one image for how this religion actually works, it is that: one fire, two stories, nobody in charge.