Vasanta

Brahmā sighed, and a young man came out of the breath wearing flowers.

The wind that arrived with him carried scent before it carried temperature. Every tree in sight put out blossom at once. Hundreds of cuckoos found the same note and held it, the fifth of the scale, the one the birds are supposed to own. The lakes went clear and filled with open lotus. None of this was seasonal. It was simply what happened in the vicinity of the being who had just been born, and the being had not yet been given a name.

The sigh had a cause. Brahmā had been humiliated by Śiva in front of the sages for the crime of desiring a woman, and he came away from that encounter nursing a grudge he could not put down. His plan was to get Śiva married, on the theory that a god who has taken a wife cannot lecture anybody about wanting one. Kāma, god of desire and Brahmā’s own son, agreed to the work but named his condition: his chief weapon was a woman, and there was no woman yet alive who could hold Śiva’s attention for a second. Brahmā sat with the problem. Then came the breath, and the flowers, and the young man standing in them.

Brahmā told Kāma what he was looking at. Here is a permanent companion, he said, made in your own image, and he will serve you the way the wind serves fire. The name he gave was Vasanta. The duty attached to it was short: follow Kāma everywhere, and delight everybody. He threw in the Malaya breeze off the sandal hills as an attendant, and handed Rati the sixty-four arts and the entire vocabulary of feigned indifference for her own retinue. Then he went away to build the woman.

The Śiva Purāṇa is unusually specific about how Vasanta looked, which is a courtesy the record rarely extends. Dark-complexioned and red as a lotus. Eyes like a lotus fully open. A face like the full moon coming up at dusk, a well-cut nose, dark curling hair, an earring in each ear. Long heavy arms, raised shoulders, a neck grooved like a conch shell, a broad chest, feet arched like a drawn bow. He walked the way a rutting elephant walks, which in Sanskrit is not an insult.

He is older than that story. In the Vedic hymns vasanta is a division of the ritual year and not yet anybody, a slot in the calendar that fixes when a brahmin lays his fires and which drugs a physician should be gathering. The Puruṣa hymn puts it at the beginning of everything: when the gods laid the primordial being on the altar and made the world out of him, spring was the clarified butter they poured, summer was the firewood, autumn was the offering itself. The season came first, and the god grew out of it across centuries, until poets could address him directly and expect an answer. Even the name is argued over. The Purāṇa derives it from the root meaning to dwell and ties it to the settled household that follows a marriage. The lexicographers prefer to hear brilliance in it.

Kālidāsa is where he becomes a character with something to lose. In the Kumārasambhava the gods need a son born to Śiva to lead their army, Śiva is sitting on a Himalayan peak inside an austerity nobody has ever interrupted, and Indra sends Kāma to break it. Kāma takes two people with him: Rati, his wife, and Vasanta, his friend.

What happens on arrival is the best writing in the poem. The mountain is out of season and the season arrives anyway. Sap moves in trees that should be locked shut. The aśoka blooms without waiting for a woman’s foot to strike it, which is the only thing an aśoka is supposed to bloom for. Animals pair off. Birds go loud. The ascetics on that slope, men who had gone years without noticing weather, find their attention sliding somewhere it has no business going. Vasanta does not persuade anyone of anything. He changes the conditions and lets the conditions do the work.

It holds for a moment and then it does not. Śiva’s concentration wavers, Śiva locates the cause, and the third eye opens. Kāma is a heap of grey ash before he can loose the arrow he had already fitted to the string. The god who had been standing beside him is untouched. Śiva is gone. The mountain is quiet again.

Rati comes back to what is left of her husband and asks Vasanta to build the pyre. He builds it. She intends to climb onto it. Halfway through the preparation a voice speaks out of empty air and tells them both to stop, because Kāma will be restored on the day Śiva takes Umā to wife, and so the two of them are left standing in the ash beside a stack of wood, waiting on a wedding nobody has agreed to yet. Kālidāsa gives Rati one line to Vasanta that does the whole job: look, Vasanta, at what has become of your friend.

His powers are all of that single kind. He does not fight, curse, bless or grant. He arrives, and the world in his vicinity becomes harder to refuse, which is precisely the service Brahmā designed him to provide and the reason the poets can call him a soldier in one breath and a florist in the next. The Ṛtusaṃhāra opens its spring canto by naming him a warrior and then spends the rest of it on mango blossom and birdsong, and both descriptions are accurate. On stage, the classical dramatists were instructed to signal his season with festivity, enjoyment and an armful of the correct flowers, no dialogue required.

The limits run the same shape. He never fought anyone. He carries no weapon, holds no domain, judges nobody and cannot act except in company; his entire function is to prepare ground for somebody else’s arrow, and when the arrow fails he has nothing left to offer but firewood. He is bound to another god’s timetable and to a calendar that runs out. Two months, Caitra and Vaiśākha, Madhu and Mādhava by their older names, and then the heat comes and the blossom goes over and the being who was made to delight all people waits a year for his next turn.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Vasanta in Hindu mythology?

Vasanta is the Hindu god of spring and the permanent companion of Kāma, the god of desire. He was created specifically to accompany Kāma and amplify his effect, and he has no independent domain, weapon or myth cycle of his own. His stated duty, assigned at birth, is to follow Kāma and to delight all people.

How was Vasanta born?

According to the Śiva Purāṇa, Brahmā produced Vasanta from a deep sigh while trying to work out how to make Śiva fall in love. Spring emerged fully formed and covered in clusters of flowers, and at the moment of his birth a fragrant wind blew, every tree blossomed, hundreds of cuckoos sang and the lakes filled with open lotus. Brahmā then named him and assigned him to Kāma as a companion, comparing the pairing to wind assisting fire.

What does Vasanta do in the Kumārasambhava?

He accompanies Kāma and Rati to the Himalayan peak where Śiva is meditating, and forces an untimely spring across the mountain to soften Śiva’s austerity. Trees sprout, the aśoka blooms out of turn, animals and birds respond, and even the resident ascetics lose their composure. When Śiva’s third eye burns Kāma to ash, Vasanta survives, and Rati asks him to build her husband’s funeral pyre.

Is Vasanta a god or just the season?

Both, in that order of development. In the Vedic hymns vasanta is simply spring, a division of the ritual and medical calendar, and the Puruṣa hymn names it as the clarified butter of the sacrifice that created the world. The personified deity, friend and attendant of Kāma, is a later development that becomes a speaking character in the Purāṇas and in classical Sanskrit poetry.

Which months make up Vasanta’s season?

Vasanta covers the two lunar months of Caitra and Vaiśākha, roughly mid-March to mid-May, known by the older names Madhu and Mādhava. It is the first of the six Indian seasons, and Sanskrit medical texts treat it as the period when kapha rises and specific plants should be harvested at their strongest.

Related Entries

Kama, Rati, Shiva, Parvati, Brahma, Daksha, Skanda, Rudra, Indra, Sarasvati, Apsaras, Gandharva, Ushas