Panis

Somewhere past the last river, behind a wall of stone that no season weathers, the cattle are lowing and nobody can hear them. The Paṇis put them there. They drove the herd across the water called Rasā, sealed it in a chamber paved with rock, filled the rest of the space with horses and treasure, and set watchmen at the mouth of it with sharpened weapons. Then they settled in to wait, which is the thing they do better than anything else.

They are not one demon but a crowd of them, a clan, and the Rigveda never bothers to separate them into names. That plurality is the point. A Paṇi is a type before he is a person, and the type is old enough that the word for it was already an ordinary insult when the hymns were composed. The Sanskrit lexicon glosses paṇi as a bargainer, a miser, a niggard, and adds the sting that matters most in a culture built on offering: one who is sparing with the oblation. The demons who guard the cave and the neighbour who will not pour ghee on the fire are called by the same word. Nobody in the tradition seems to have found that confusing.

The stone chamber is the centre of everything they are. In the Vala myth it is a treasure-house and a prison at once, holding cattle that belong somewhere else, and the cows are not merely livestock. They carry the whole freight of what the Vedic world counted as life: milk, wealth, the light of morning, the working of ritual order itself. The Paṇis take that and put a lid on it. Whether they stole the herd or simply found it and shut the door is left unclear, and the older layers of the poetry are more interested in the shut door than in the theft.

Then Indra sends a dog. Saramā crosses the Rasā, which the hymn treats as a real and frightening crossing, and arrives at the rock alone. The Paṇis meet her with courtesy and questions. What brings you here, they ask, the road is long, how did you get over the water. She tells them she comes as Indra’s messenger and has come for their stores of wealth. What is this Indra like, they say, and the offer underneath the question is almost funny: let him come, we will be friendly, we will make him the herdsman of our cattle. She warns them that he is beyond their reach and that they will lie low when he kills them. They show her the weapons. Who is going to loose these cows for you without a fight, they ask, and note the walls, and note the guards.

What follows is the strangest turn in the hymn, because it is not a fight. It is a bribe. Turn back, the Paṇis say, and be our sister; do not go; we will give you a share of the cattle. Saramā answers that she knows nothing of sisterhood, that Indra and the dread Aṅgirases know about such things, and that they seemed hungry for cows when she left. Then she tells them to get out of the way. The last verse of the hymn is not a battle either. It is a command that the cattle come out lowing, as holy law requires, kine that Bṛhaspati and Soma and the seers and the pressing-stones found when they were hidden. Songs open the rock. The Paṇis, who prepared for arrows, are undone by chanting.

A later retelling in the Bṛhaddevatā, the old catalogue of Rigvedic deities, will not leave the story so clean. There Bṛhaspati sees the theft and reports it, Indra dispatches Saramā, and the Paṇis buy her after all, with milk. She drinks it, crosses back over the hundred-league river, and lies to Indra about what she has seen. He kicks her. She brings the milk back up and returns trembling to the Paṇis, and Indra follows the track her steps have left. That version is harder on everyone, and it makes the Paṇis better at their work than the hymn admits. They understood that the messenger had a mouth.

The Rigveda never says what they look like. It says they are watchful, that they are many, that their words are weak for wounding, and it throws one line about their wicked bodies being proof against arrows, which is less a description than a shrug at their defences. So they remain what the poets needed them to be: shapes in the dark on the other side of the water, distinguishable mainly by the noise of the herd behind them.

Their strength is entirely negative and entirely effective for a while. They can hide what they hold, and the hiding place is a piece of the earth’s own architecture. They can arm and post guards. Best of all, they can talk, and their talk works on the vocabulary of kinship and gift-exchange that the Vedic world runs on, which is why they reach for sisterhood and a share of the cattle rather than for a spear. Their weakness follows from the same place. A hoard is a fixed target. The Paṇis have nothing to do but stand still and keep the door shut, and standing still is no defence against Bṛhaspati’s cry and the Aṅgirases’ unwearied singing, which do not need to get past the guards to work on the stone. What they hold is not theirs and the whole cosmos knows it.

There is one Paṇi who does not fit. In the sixth book a carpenter called Bṛbu is praised for giving thousands of cattle to the Bharadvāja priests, and the singers place him above the Paṇis, over their highest head, like a wide bush on the bank of the Ganges. The compliment only lands if everyone hearing it took Paṇi to mean tight-fisted. It also suggests, quietly, that these were people before they were demons.

Modern scholarship has pushed on that suggestion. A long-standing reading treats the Paṇis of the hymns as a real non-Vedic community of traders and lenders, wealthy, mobile and disinclined to fund somebody else’s rituals, whose reputation curdled into a demonology; Asko Parpola places them among the peoples the incoming Indo-Aryans met in what is now Waziristan and southeastern Afghanistan. A nineteenth-century enthusiasm went further and tried to make them Phoenicians, which is an etymological guess and nothing sturdier. These are arguments about history, made by named scholars in the last two centuries, and the Rigveda itself makes none of them. What the hymns give is a rock, a river, a dog with a message, and a group of watchmen who would rather negotiate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Panis in Hindu mythology?

The Panis are a class of demons in the Rigveda who hoard cattle and treasure in a sealed rock chamber beyond the river Rasā. They are always plural, a clan rather than an individual, and their name comes from a Sanskrit word meaning bargainer or miser, especially one who is stingy with sacrificial offerings.

What did the Panis steal?

The Panis concealed a herd of cows that the Vedic tradition treats as far more than livestock, since cattle stand for wealth, milk, the light of dawn and the working of ritual order. Hiding them inside the rock amounts to shutting away the world’s supply of life, which is why Indra, Bṛhaspati and the Angirases go to such lengths to get them back.

What happened between Sarama and the Panis?

Indra sent the divine dog Saramā across the river Rasā to find the hidden cattle, and Rigveda 10.108 records her exchange with the Panis. They boasted of their weapons and their rock-paved treasure chamber, then tried to bribe her with sisterhood and a share of the cows; she refused and warned them that Indra and the Angirases were coming.

How were the Panis defeated?

Not by force. The hymn ends with the cattle called out of the rock by Bṛhaspati, Soma, the seers and the pressing-stones, meaning the stone was opened by ritual sound rather than broken in a battle. A later account in the Bṛhaddevatā adds that the Panis first succeeded in buying Saramā off with milk, and that Indra had to kick the truth out of her before following her tracks back to the cave.

Were the Panis real people?

Some modern scholars think so. A long-running interpretation reads the Panis of the hymns as an actual non-Vedic community of traders and moneylenders who declined to sponsor Vedic sacrifices and were demonised for it, and Asko Parpola locates such peoples in the region of present-day Waziristan and southeastern Afghanistan. The Rigveda itself makes no historical claim of this kind, and one hymn even praises a generous Pani named Bṛbu.

Related Entries

Indra, Sharvara and Shyama, Asura, Soma, Ushas, Agni, Danava, Daitya, Rakshasa, Deva, Varuna, Aditi