Parvati

Winter on the Himalayan ridge, and a woman is standing in the river. The water is snowmelt. She has been in it since the light failed and she will be in it when the light returns, repeating five syllables under her breath while the cold climbs her legs. In the hot months she sat inside a ring of fires and let them burn around her. In the rains she sat on bare rock and let the sky empty itself over her head. This has been going on for three thousand years, and the man she is doing it for has still not looked up.

Her name means simply “of the mountain.” She is the daughter of Himavat, king of the Himalayas, and his wife Mena, and the elder sister of Ganga, who left home to become a river. Most of her other names are addresses rather than titles: Girija and Shailaja, born of the peak; Haimavati, the snowy mountain’s own. A goddess named after the ground she came from is a goddess with a fixed address, and the texts never let anyone forget where she is from.

The oldest place she appears is not a myth of love at all. In the Kena Upanishad, Brahman wins a victory for the gods, and the gods take the credit for it. Something unrecognisable appears among them. Agni is sent to identify it and announces that he can burn anything on earth; a single straw is placed in front of him and he cannot scorch it. Vayu is sent and claims he can blow away anything on earth; the same straw defeats him. Indra goes, and the shape vanishes before he reaches it, and in the empty space he finds a woman, beautifully adorned, Uma of golden hue, daughter of Himavat. She tells him what he is looking at in one sentence. Before the tradition made her anybody’s wife, it made her the one who explains.

The Puranic account gives her a harder beginning. She is Sati returned. Sati was the daughter of Daksha, married Shiva over her father’s objection, and destroyed herself when Daksha staged a sacrifice and pointedly left her husband out of it. Shiva withdrew into meditation on a Himalayan ridge and stayed there. Meanwhile the demon Taraka had secured a boon that only a son of Shiva could kill him, and Shiva had no son and no intention of getting one. The entire courtship that follows is, from the gods’ side, a military operation with a wedding at the end of it.

Their first attempt was blunt. Indra sent Kamadeva, the god of desire, to break the meditation with an arrow, and Parvati was standing there, freshly adorned and full of hope, when Shiva opened the third eye and reduced desire itself to ash. The smell of it stayed on that ridge. She would come back to the same place, later, to do the thing that actually worked.

Her mother tried to stop her. Menā’s argument in the Shiva Purana is the argument of every mother in the world: do it at home, all the holy places are already in this house, you are slender and the penance is hard, and besides, a woman going out to a penance grove to get what she wants is something nobody has ever heard of. Parvati went. She left the fine clothes behind, put on bark and a girdle of munja grass and a deer skin, and set up on the ridge where Kama had burned. She ate fruit the first year and leaves the second, and then she stopped eating leaves as well, and the gods started calling her Aparna, the one without leaves. She stood on one foot. People walked up the mountain to look at her and went home saying there had never been a penance like it and never would be. Around her hermitage the lions stopped troubling the cattle and the cats left the mice alone.

Then came the test, and it is the best scene in her story. A young brahmin arrived at her fire and asked what she was doing there, and when she told him, he began, gently and at length, to run Shiva down. The list is thorough. Ashes from the funeral pyre on his skin. Matted hair. A tiger hide, an elephant hide, a skull in his hand, serpents wound round his arms, the poison stain on his throat. No traceable family. No house, no money, no clothes worth the name, and one bull. Ghosts for company and a drum that sounds wrong. Handing over a gold coin, he told her, you are trying to buy a piece of glass. Setting aside sandal paste, you want to smear yourself with mud. She heard him out to the end, and then she lost her temper, which was the correct answer, because the brahmin was Shiva.

He married her. What happened next is recorded in the Ramayana with unusual frankness. Shiva and Uma went to bed and stayed there for a hundred divine years, and the gods grew frightened, because nothing in the three worlds was built to survive the child that was coming. They went to Kailasa and asked him to stop. He agreed. What had already stirred could not be recalled, and so it went into the earth, and the fire god was sent in after it, and out of that came a white mountain and a forest of reeds bright as the sun, and out of the reeds came Kartikeya. The gods were delighted. Uma, prevented from bearing her own son, turned on them with her eyes red and cursed their wives to be barren, and then cursed the earth for taking what should have been hers.

So she made a child herself. In the Shiva Purana she complains to her friends that every one of the attendants at her door takes orders from her husband, and that not one of them is hers. While she is bathing she gathers the scurf from her own body and shapes a boy out of it, dresses him, gives him a staff, and gives him a single instruction: nobody comes in without my permission. She embraces him and says that she has no one else to call her own. Shiva arrives at his own door and is refused entry by a boy with a stick, twice, and the quarrel that follows costs the boy his head, which is later replaced with an elephant’s. She had asked for a servant of her own and got Ganesha instead.

She is also, in the Devi Mahatmya, the body other goddesses come out of. The gods are on Himavat praising the Devi when Parvati comes down to bathe in the Ganga and asks who exactly they are praising, and the answer is given by a goddess who steps out of her at that moment. Because Ambika came out of Parvati’s sheath, the text says, she is called Kaushiki everywhere in the world. And when that brightness had left her, Parvati went dark, and from then on she is called Kalika and stays on the mountain. Kali and Durga are not her rivals in this account. They are what she sheds.

Her power is the reason any of this matters. Shaiva theology treats her as the active force in a partnership where the other half is famously inert, and the shared body of Ardhanarishvara makes that visible: one figure, split down the middle, neither side able to do much alone. Her austerity moves the natural world and outlasts a god’s indifference. She is invoked for marriages and children and the running of a household, and she is also the ground from which the battle goddesses walk out fully armed.

And almost none of it gets her what she asks for directly. Beauty did not work. Desire was sent to help her and was burned alive for the attempt. She got Shiva by sitting in the snow until he ran out of ways to ignore her, which is a victory but a slow and undignified one. She could not carry the son the gods wanted, could not keep the head of the son she made, and both curses on her lips are the words of somebody who has just been overruled by a committee. The mountain’s daughter spends the whole record being told what a woman does not do, and doing it anyway, and the earliest thing anyone wrote about her still holds: everyone else is guessing, and she is the one who knows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Parvati in Hindu mythology?

Parvati is the Hindu goddess of the mountain, daughter of Himavat, king of the Himalayas, and the wife of Shiva. She is the mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, and in Shaiva and Shakta tradition she is the active power that makes Shiva effective. Her name means “she of the mountain,” and she is also called Uma, Gauri, Aparna and Ambika.

How did Parvati win Shiva as her husband?

Parvati won Shiva through extreme austerity rather than beauty. After Shiva burned Kamadeva to ash for trying to break his meditation with desire, Parvati went to the same Himalayan ridge, wore bark and a deer skin, and performed penance for three thousand years, sitting inside fires in summer, in the rain during the monsoon and in water during winter. Shiva finally came to her disguised as a young brahmin, insulted himself to her face to test her resolve, and married her when she refused to listen.

Is Parvati the same as Durga and Kali?

They are closely identified but the Devi Mahatmya treats them as emerging from her. In that text Ambika, also called Kaushiki, steps out of Parvati’s own body, and once that brightness has left, Parvati turns dark and is called Kalika. Later tradition generally regards Parvati, Durga and Kali as forms of one great goddess, with Parvati as the benign household form.

Why did Parvati create Ganesha?

Parvati created Ganesha because none of the attendants at her door were her own; they all took their orders from Shiva. While bathing she formed a boy from the scurf of her own body, gave him a staff, and told him to let nobody in without her permission. When Shiva arrived and was refused entry, the quarrel ended with the boy’s head being cut off and later replaced with an elephant’s.

What is Parvati called besides Parvati?

Her best-known other names are Uma, Gauri, Aparna and Ambika. The Shiva Purana explains Uma as coming from her mother’s attempt to stop her going to the forest, and Aparna, meaning “leafless,” from the stage of her penance when she gave up eating even leaves. Girija, Shailaja and Haimavati all mean the same thing as Parvati, referring to her birth from the mountain.

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Shiva, Ganesha, Skanda, Ardhanarishvara, Kali, Durga, Devi, Daksha, Ganga, Kama, Rudra, Brahma, Vishnu, Indra, Agni