The Artists of the Sky

Every court has its musicians. The king on his throne, the ministers at their business, the guards at the doors — and somewhere near the centre, making the whole thing bearable and beautiful, the singers and dancers and players whose only task is delight. Heaven is no different. If the last chapters gave us the guardians who defend the cosmos and the mothers who fight its wars, this one gives us its artists: the beings whose function in the divine order is beauty itself. They are the loveliest members of the whole retinue, and — precisely because they are so lovely — among the most dangerous.

The music and the dance of heaven

The court of Indra, king of the gods, is the great pleasure-heaven of the Hindu imagination — a place of gardens and jewelled halls where the blessed dead enjoy the fruits of their merit — and its entertainers are the gandharvas and the apsarás. The gandharvas are the male celestial musicians, the singers and instrumentalists of the gods, masters of a heavenly music so perfect that a whole style of ideal, spontaneous marriage — the gāndharva-vivāha, the love-match made by mutual consent alone, without ceremony or family — is named after them. The apsarás are their counterparts and consorts: the celestial nymphs, the dancers, the incomparably beautiful women of heaven, born (the Puranas say) from the churning of the ocean of milk, rising from the waves along with the moon and the wish-granting tree and the nectar of immortality. Together they are the art of heaven — the gandharva’s song and the apsará’s dance, filling the divine court with a beauty that is the sensory face of blessedness itself.

But this beauty has an older and stranger root, and this treatise’s method asks us to notice it. In the oldest layer, the Ṛgveda, “the Gandharva” is not yet a court musician at all. He is a single, mysterious, half-cosmic being — a guardian of the soma, the sacred plant of immortality, and a keeper of hidden knowledge, a figure associated with the borderland between the worlds. And the apsará of the earliest texts is a being of the waters and of fate, linked to the mysterious currents that shape a life. The gorgeous performers of the later heaven grew out of these numinous, uncanny origins — the music-of-the-gods was, once, the guardianship of the drink of the gods. Keep both in view: the artist and the older mystery behind the artist.

The beauty that breaks the holy man

Here is where the apsará becomes one of the most fascinating figures in Hindu myth, because heaven puts her to a very particular and revealing use. The Hindu cosmos runs, in part, on tapas — the heat, the power, the spiritual capital that an ascetic accumulates through austerity and concentration. And tapas is genuinely powerful: a sage who piles up enough of it can win boons that shake the three worlds, can rival and even threaten the gods, can force Indra himself to tremble on his throne. What, then, does a nervous heaven do about a mortal whose meditation is becoming too strong? It does not send an army. It sends an apsará.

The most famous case is Menakā and the sage Viśvāmitra. Viśvāmitra — a king who had renounced his throne to become a brahmin-sage — accumulated such terrifying austerity that the gods feared he would overturn the order of the world. So Indra sent Menakā, loveliest of the apsarás, to break his concentration; and she succeeded, and from their union was born Śakuntalā, whose story opens the Mahābhārata’s royal line and became the greatest of all Sanskrit plays. Another apsará, Urvaśī, is the subject of one of the oldest and most haunting dialogues in the Ṛgveda (10.95), her doomed love for the mortal king Purūravas — the celestial woman who cannot finally stay in the human world. Rambhā, Tilottamā and others recur throughout the epics in the same role: the divine beauty sent to test, to tempt, to undo.

It would be easy to read these as simple stories of seduction, but they are doing something deeper. They stage, again and again, the central tension of the whole tradition: between the fierce inward power of renunciation and the outward pull of beauty and desire — between tapas and kāma, the ascetic and the sensual, the two great forces the tradition holds in permanent, productive tension. The apsará is desire personified and divinized, and the fact that she is sent by the gods themselves means the tension is not a battle between good and evil but a balance within the divine order. Heaven contains the ascetic’s fire and the dancer’s beauty, and it uses each to check the other. The apsará is not a devil tempting a saint; she is one half of the cosmos reminding the other half that it is not the whole.

The half-beings and the flyers on wisdom

Two more classes complete the celestial company, and they widen the picture in useful ways. The kinnaras (with their partners the kimpuruṣas, “is-it-a-man?” beings) are the half-and-half creatures of the sky — in the Indian tradition typically part human and part horse, in the later and Buddhist imagination part human and part bird — and they are musicians too, but musicians who have come to stand above all for devoted, faithful love, the kinnara and his mate inseparable, singing together. They are the retinue’s emblem of tenderness, the gentleness of heaven as the apsará is its allure. And the vidyādharas — the “holders of vidyā,” of knowledge or magic — are the sky-faring adepts who fly not on wings but on their own attainment, wielding supernatural powers and enchanted knowledge, sweeping through the great story-collections of later Sanskrit literature as a whole airborne race of magical beings. If the apsará is beauty and the kinnara is love, the vidyādhara is the dream of knowledge-as-power, wisdom that literally lifts you off the ground.

The aesthetic dimension of heaven

Step back and see what this whole company adds to our map. We have had the god at the centre, the wild host, the fierce guardians, the mothering powers, the deep spirits of earth and water. The celestial artists give the cosmos something none of those provide: beauty as a divine function. In the Hindu imagination the sacred is not only powerful and orderly and protective; it is also gorgeous, musical, sensual, delightful — and heaven employs whole classes of being for no other purpose than to make it so. This is why the walls of temples are covered not only with gods and guardians but with dancers and musicians and celestial lovers, the surasundarīs and apsarás whose grace at Khajuraho and Konark has puzzled and enchanted visitors for a thousand years. They are not decoration in the trivial sense. They are the doctrine that heaven is beautiful, made visible in stone: the retinue insisting that delight, too, is a face of the divine.

And they carry the tradition’s honest ambivalence about that delight — beauty as heaven’s gift and heaven’s snare, the same apsará who graces the god’s court sent down to unmake the holy man. We have now seen the retinue at its most lovely. It is time to turn to its opposite: the beings of the dark, the ghosts and goblins and demons who haunt the edges of the sacred — and to discover that they, too, have their place, and even their redemption, in the ecosystem of the divine.