The Lord of the Hosts

Sometimes the fastest way into a vast subject is a single word.

The word is gaṇa. It is one of the oldest and most ordinary words in Sanskrit, and it means, at its simplest, a group — a troop, a band, a multitude, a collection of things taken together as one. A herd is a gaṇa. A company of soldiers is a gaṇa. A committee is a gaṇa; the modern Indian republic calls itself, in its own languages, a gaṇa-rājya, a “republic,” a rule by the assembled many. There is nothing mystical about the word. It is the plainest possible name for the many gathered into one.

And yet if you follow that plain word through the tradition, it will lead you into the heart of one of Hinduism’s strangest and most revealing ideas — that the highest god is served by the lowest beings, and is the greater for it.

One word, running through the whole tradition

Watch where the word goes. The grammarian Panini, codifying Sanskrit around the fourth century BCE with a precision that would not be matched in the West for two thousand years, needed a term for a class of words that all behaved the same way — a set that took the same ending, followed the same rule. He called such a set a gaṇa, and the appendix listing them is the gaṇapāṭha, “the recitation of the classes.” Here the word means category — the many words that share one grammatical fate.

Go back further, into the oldest layer of all, the Ṛgveda, and you meet the storm-gods called the Maruts — a troop of young, violent, brilliant warriors who ride the thunderclouds. And riding with them, or leading them, is the fierce archer Rudra, the howler, the outsider among the Vedic gods, the one you pray will keep his arrows away from your cattle and your children. The Maruts are Rudra’s gaṇa — his troop, his host. Already, at the very beginning, the frightening god has a band around him. When Rudra grows, over a thousand years, into the great god Śiva, the band grows with him.

By the time of the Puranas — the vast storehouse of story and cosmology composed across the first millennium of the common era — Śiva’s host has become something unmistakable and unforgettable: the gaṇas proper, and their inner core the pramatha-gaṇas, “the tormentors,” “the churners.” These are the dwarfish, pot-bellied, animal-faced, misshapen beings who throng the slopes of Kailasa and pour out of the cremation grounds in Śiva’s train. And because he leads them, Śiva takes one of his proudest names: Gaṇanātha, Gaṇapati, Gaṇeśa — lord of the hosts. One word — gaṇa — running from a grammarian’s word-list to a Vedic storm-troop to the master-title of the great god. Hold that thread. It is the first thread of the whole web.

The host from the burning ground

What do the gaṇas actually look like, and where do they come from? The texts and the sculptors agree, and they are vivid about it. The gaṇas are not beautiful. Where the great gods are serene and symmetrical, the gaṇas are squat and swollen-bellied, some with the faces of lions or boars or monkeys, some with too many limbs or too few, some skeletal, some fanged, all of them restless. They dance, they drum, they brawl, they laugh. They carry clubs and drink and make an enormous noise. On temple plinths across India you can find them: a frieze of little grinning grotesques who appear to be carrying the whole temple on their shoulders, the bhūta-gaṇa course that bears the sanctuary up. The god sits in perfect stillness at the summit; the host holds the building of the world on its back, and seems to find the job hilarious.

And where do they come from? Overwhelmingly, from the margins — from exactly the places ordinary religion fears and avoids. They belong to the śmaśāna, the cremation ground, that impure and terrifying edge-place where the dead are burned and the ascetics who have renounced the world of the living go to meditate. They belong to the forest and the crossroads and the night. This is the deep logic of the gaṇas, and it is the deep logic of Śiva himself. Śiva is the god who lives where the other gods will not go. He wears the ash of the dead and a garland of skulls; he keeps company with ghosts; he is the patron of those who have stepped outside the safe, ordered, householder’s world — the ascetic, the yogī, the madman, the outsider. A god like that does not have a court of polished courtiers. He has a host of the wild, the ugly, the impure and the free. The gaṇas are the society of the margin, gathered around the lord of the margin.

This is why their grotesqueness is not an embarrassment to be explained away but the very thing the tradition is trying to say. In most religious imaginations the sacred is the beautiful, the pure, the high, and everything ugly and impure and low is pushed out of the temple. Śiva’s world runs the other way. The impure cremation ground is where liberation is found; the ash of death is the mark of the deathless; and the deformed, laughing, marginal beings are not shut out of the divine society but are the divine society. To be taken into Śiva’s host is for the outcast to be honoured. The god of the outsiders is served by an army of outsiders, and the picture insists that this makes him greater, not lesser.

The one who leads the many

Every host needs a commander, and the story of who commands Śiva’s gaṇas is one of the most consequential in all of Hinduism — because it is the story of how the elephant-headed god got his name.

The title Gaṇapati means “lord of the gaṇas,” and it belonged to Śiva first. But the Puranas tell how it passed to his son. In the best-known version, Parvati, needing a guardian at her door while she bathed, forms a boy from the substance of her own body and sets him to keep watch. Śiva, returning and refused entry by a boy he does not recognise, strikes off his head in fury; then, seeing Parvati’s grief, restores him to life with the head of the first creature to hand — an elephant. And to make amends, and to honour the boy’s absolute loyalty, Śiva appoints him commander over the entire host: Gaṇapati, lord of the gaṇas. This is why the elephant-headed god is invoked at the beginning of every undertaking, every text, every journey, every rite. He is the master of the multitude, the one who marshals the wild host, and therefore the one who can clear the obstacles that the wild host might otherwise strew in your path. (His full story belongs elsewhere; this treatise hands it to the deity-page on Ganesha.) The point here is only the shape of the thing: over the many stands one — appointed, not self-declared — and the one who governs the host is the one you approach first.

There is a second, fiercer commander worth meeting, because he shows the other face of the host. When Śiva’s father-in-law Dakṣa holds a great sacrifice and pointedly fails to invite Śiva, insulting him before all the gods, Śiva’s grief at his wife Satī’s death turns to wrath — and from that wrath he tears a being into existence: Vīrabhadra, a gaṇa of terrifying power, who leads the host to shatter Dakṣa’s sacrifice, scatter the gods, and behead Dakṣa himself. Vīrabhadra is the gaṇa as Śiva’s rage given a body and a sword — the retinue not as comic relief but as the instrument of the god’s terrible justice. He is the same host that carries the temple on its shoulders and laughs; turned to war, it is the end of the world for those who scorn its master.

So the gaṇas hold, between the comic and the catastrophic, the whole ambivalence of the divine retinue. They are Śiva’s family, his army, his revellers, his energy and his wrath. They famously form the wedding-party — the bāraat — that accompanies Śiva to marry Parvati, and the sight of the bridegroom’s guests, a horde of skull-garlanded, ash-smeared, animal-faced ghouls arriving at the door of the mountain-king’s palace, terrifies the bride’s family half to death. It is a comic scene and a theological one at once: this is what it means to marry the lord of the margins. His people come with him. You do not get the serene god without his wild host, because the wild host is the god, externalised — his powers, his freedom, his refusal of the tidy world, given a hundred grinning faces.

Hold, then, the first class of beings clearly, because everything that follows is built on it. Around the still god at the centre stands a host: many, wild, ranked, and led. Follow one of them — the calm white bull who is also the host’s chief and the god’s own gatekeeper, and the strange three-legged sage who could not tell the god from the goddess — and the court of Śiva opens one door further.