Who is Murugan?

Of all the great gods of Hinduism, Murugan may be the one whose story is most clearly a meeting of two worlds. In the Sanskrit scriptures of the north he is Kartikeya or Skanda, the fierce general of the gods, born to kill a demon no one else could touch. In the Tamil south he is Murugan, “the beautiful one,” a god of such intimacy and antiquity that he is simply the Tamil deity, sung in poems older than almost any devotion in India. The figure worshipped today is both at once, and the seam where the two joined is part of what makes him so loved.

He is the son of Shiva and Parvati, and the younger brother, in the usual telling, of Ganesha. But to understand him you have to follow both his stories, the northern and the southern, and see how they became one.

The god of many names

Murugan is known by a crowd of names, and each marks a facet of him. Kartikeya means “son of the Krittikas,” the six star-maidens of the Pleiades who nursed him. Skanda, his great Sanskrit name, comes from a root meaning to leap or to spurt, for he was born from the leaping fire of Shiva’s seed. Subrahmanya marks his closeness to sacred knowledge. Shanmukha means “six-faced.” Guha means the hidden or secret one. And in Tamil he is Murugan and Velan, the one who bears the Vel, the spear. The sheer number of his names is itself a clue to his history: many streams of devotion, gathered into one god.

Born to slay the demon

His birth is one of the great set-pieces of the Puranas, and its strangeness is the point. The gods are being destroyed by a demon, Taraka in the Sanskrit sources, Surapadma in the Tamil, who holds a boon that he can be killed only by a son of Shiva. But Shiva is the great ascetic, lost in meditation, fathering no children. The whole drama of the birth is the rousing of that fire. When at last the seed of Shiva is released, it is too blazing for anyone to bear; it is carried by Agni the fire-god and the river Ganga, set down at last in a bed of reeds, and there nursed by the six Krittikas. To drink from all six at once the child takes six faces, and so becomes Shanmukha, the six-faced. Parvati embraces the six infants and they fuse into one body. Grown, he becomes Devasenapati, commander of the army of the gods, and destroys the demon with his spear. In the Tamil telling the demon, hiding as a great mango tree, is split by the Vel, and the two halves become Murugan’s peacock and his rooster-banner.

The spear and the peacock

His iconography is unmistakable, and it is built around a single object. The Vel, the leaf-bladed lance given to him by his mother Parvati, is his defining emblem, and the tradition reads it as far more than a weapon: it is divine knowledge itself, sharp and bright, piercing the demon of ignorance. To his Tamil devotees the cry Vetri Vel, “victorious spear,” is almost his whole worship. He rides the peacock, Paravani, its beauty and its mastery of the serpent both fitting a youthful god of victory, and a rooster crows on his banner. He is shown perpetually young, the eternal kumara, and often six-faced and twelve-armed in the southern bronzes, an image instantly recognised across the Tamil world.

Two brides, two worlds

One feature of Murugan’s story tells the secret of who he is more clearly than any doctrine: he has two wives, and they come from opposite worlds. The first is Devasena, in Tamil Deivanai, the daughter of Indra, won by divine arrangement, the celestial and the proper match. The second is Valli, a girl of the hill tribes, a hunter’s daughter, whom he wins by courtship rather than arrangement, disguising himself and wooing her in the forest. The tradition reads the two marriages as the union of two worlds in the god himself: the Sanskritic and the heavenly in Devasena, the indigenous Tamil and the earthy in Valli. The very figure of Murugan, scholars like Fred Clothey and Kamil Zvelebil have argued, is exactly such a marriage, the war-god Skanda of the Sanskrit north joined to the ancient hill-and-war deity of the Tamil land, and the Valli romance is among the oldest indigenous fragments of Tamil myth.

The Tamil god

Nowhere is Murugan loved as he is in the Tamil country, and nowhere is his worship older. He appears in the Sangam poetry of the first centuries of the Common Era as Seyon, “the Red One,” the god of the hills and of war and of the ecstatic dance, and the Tirumurukarruppatai, an early poem that serves as a guide to his shrines, is among the first sustained devotional poems in Tamil. His sacred geography is the Arupadai Veedu, the six abodes, six great temples across Tamil Nadu, each tied to an episode of his story: Tiruchendur by the sea where he defeated the demon, Palani where he stands as the renunciant, Swamimalai where he taught, and three more. His festivals, above all Thaipusam with its Kavadi, the burden carried in vow and trance, draw enormous crowds across Tamil Nadu and the diaspora to this day. The devotee who takes up the Kavadi walks for miles under its weight, often pierced with small spears in his honour, a living echo of the Vel, offering the body itself as the act of worship.

There is a beautiful tradition that captures his deepest aspect. At Swamimalai, the story goes, the boy Murugan challenged even Brahma to explain the meaning of Om, the sacred syllable, and when Brahma could not, expounded it himself, and then taught it to his own father Shiva, who took his son upon his knee as a disciple. For this Parvati named him Swaminatha, lord even to her lord. The general of the gods is also, in this telling, the guru, the youthful teacher whose knowledge surpasses the elders’.

North and south

It is worth ending on the arc of his worship, because it is unusual. Murugan was once a major deity across India: he appears on the coins of the Kushan kings in the early centuries CE, was honoured by the Guptas, and is the hero of Kalidasa’s great Sanskrit poem on the birth of the war-god. Over the centuries his prominence faded in the north, where his brother Ganesha rose, while in the Tamil south his worship only deepened, until he became what he is now, the god the Tamil people hold most as their own.

A war-god of the Sanskrit scriptures and a red god of the Tamil hills met somewhere in the deep past and became one youthful figure with a spear and a peacock. He is, in the truest sense, a god of two worlds joined, and the join is exactly where his devotees find him.