Sambara

Also Known As: Sanskrit शम्बर, Śambara; also Shambara, Samvara, and Shambarasura or Śambarāsura, “Shambara the asura”; called Kālaśambara, “Shambara the death-dealing,” in the Vishnu Purana
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Hindu Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He takes any form he pleases and commands hundreds of illusions learned from Maya Danava, from a sky-borne downpour of borrowed weapons to spells that answer whatever is thrown at them.
Role in Mythos: He is the asura king who steals the newborn Pradyumna out of Krishna’s palace to prevent a prophecy and is beheaded by that same child grown, in his own city, using magic taught by a woman of his own household.
Relation to Humans: Mortals appear in his story as staff: fishermen who sell him a catch, cooks who cut it open, a woman set to preparing his vegetables and rice. Not one of them is on his side, and one of them raises his killer under his own roof for twenty years.

The cooks had a big fish on the block. It had come up in a net with the rest of the morning’s haul, been carried through the gate of the asura’s palace with the rest, and gone to the kitchen with the rest, and when the knife opened its belly there was a living boy inside. Nobody in the house had any idea what they were looking at. The demon who owned the kitchen had put that child into the sea himself, days-old and squalling, and had gone home satisfied. His own fishermen had now brought him back, and his own cooks had just unwrapped him.

Sambara is an asura, and every telling of him starts with the thing he did first, because nothing else about him matters as much. He learned, from somewhere the sources never explain, that a son born to Krishna and Rukmini in Dvaraka would be his death. The child had been on the earth for six days, or not quite ten, depending on which Purana is counting. Sambara walked into the lying-in chamber and took him. Wilson’s translation of the Vishnu Purana gives him three words at this point, terrible as death, and then gets on with it. He carried the infant out over the water and dropped him into a whirlpool of roaring waves, the haunt of the huge creatures of the deep, which is thorough by the standards of the genre. A large fish swallowed the boy. The boy did not die.

For a figure the whole episode is named against, he is oddly hard to see. He held a city, a household, kitchen staff, wives, and a standing host of fighters, and the record gives almost nothing of his person. The single moment any text describes his face is the moment it stops being attached to him: the Bhagavata Purana, at 10.55.24, notes the head that Pradyumna’s sword takes off, complete with red moustache, helmet and earrings. It is a strange inventory to be handed at the end rather than the beginning. Then again, the same chapter says he could assume any form he desired, so a face was never going to be a reliable way to find him.

What he had instead of a body was a repertoire. The Bhagavata credits his black arts to Maya Danava, the great artificer of the demons, and puts hundreds of spells at his disposal. Rati, warning Pradyumna, says so plainly: he knows hundreds of them. Against a challenger he does not stand and fight so much as open a catalogue, rising into the air and raining weapons down, then loosing the mystic armaments of the Guhyakas, the Gandharvas, the Pishachas, the Uragas and the Rakshasas in turn. It is an impressive arsenal. Every item in it belongs to somebody else.

The woman in his kitchen was Rati, the wife of Kama, waiting out the years since Shiva’s glance had burned her husband to ash. The sources cannot agree on her standing in the house. The Vishnu Purana makes her Mayadevi, his own wife, mistress of the household, supervising the cooks. The Bhagavata demotes her to a maidservant Sambara had assigned to prepare vegetables and rice. Narada, turning up in the kitchen at the useful moment, tells her whose child she is holding, and later, in Dvaraka, tells Rukmini that this was the virtuous Mayavati, Pradyumna’s wife and never Sambara’s at all: the goddess had taken a delusive form and fascinated the demon with illusory pleasures for as long as it took. The master of illusion had been living inside somebody else’s, and he had put her on the payroll.

She raised the boy. When he reached adolescence she looked at him in a way that no longer fitted the arrangement, and he told her so, remarking that she was overstepping a mother’s feelings and behaving like a lover. Her answer was the truth: he was Vishnu’s son, stolen from a birth chamber, cut out of a fish in this very room, and his real mother was still weeping for him somewhere across the water. Then she gave him the mahamaya vidya, the knowledge that unmakes every other deluding spell, which was hers to give and had been sitting in Sambara’s house for twenty years.

Pradyumna went to the gate and started with insults, because a duel needs a beginning. Sambara came out agitated as a kicked snake, eyes red, club in hand. He spun the club and threw it and it went through the air with a crack like thunder, and Pradyumna knocked it aside with his own and threw that back. Then the magic began, and the magic was the whole contest. The Bhagavata has the demon in the sky under a rain of weapons, each wave met and struck down. The Vishnu Purana keeps a tally instead: seven times Pradyumna foiled the delusions of the enchanter, and on the eighth he took command of it and turned it against its owner. Either way the ending is a sword. Flowers came down from the higher worlds, and Rati appeared in the sky and carried her husband home to Dvaraka, where the palace women mistook him for Krishna and hid.

His powers were real and his foresight was genuinely good. He identified the one being in the world who could kill him while that being was still too young to lift his own head, and he acted immediately. The trouble is that everything he owned was answerable. Borrowed illusions have a counter-illusion, and the counter-illusion was in his kitchen. Worse, and this is what the story is actually about, his precaution was the mechanism. He put the child in the sea, the sea put it in a fish, the fish came to his door as food, and he had his enemy raised, fed and trained under his own roof for two decades without once looking up. He never went back to check the body.

The Rigveda has a Sambara of its own, and he is not this one. There, in a verse to Indra, the god demolishes Sambara’s nine-and-ninety castles for the sake of Divodasa, and the figure behind that line is a fortress-holding chieftain of the Dasas, an enemy of a Vedic king rather than a Puranic sorcerer with a kitchen and a prophecy. The name is shared. The record is not.

The Puranas do not tell the story identically either. Wilson noticed that while the Bhagavata follows the Vishnu Purana closely, the Harivamsha leaves out the fish altogether, which removes the detail everyone remembers and most of the irony with it. The Harivamsha version, at chapters 162 to 165, is nonetheless the one that travelled furthest. Around 1585 a painter in Lahore, working on a copy of the Persian Harivamsha made for the emperor Akbar by Mullah Sheri, who was killed in Kashmir the following February, painted the last few seconds of Sambara’s life: fighting across a pale green ground, a horse-drawn chariot, demons already fallen, palms and grey rock behind, three enthroned figures watching from a cloud. The folio sits in Los Angeles now under accession number M.83.105.4. The catalogue calls it Pradyumna Kills Shambara.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sambara in Hindu mythology?

Sambara, also spelled Shambara, is an asura king of the Krishna cycle who abducted the infant Pradyumna, the newborn son of Krishna and Rukmini, and threw him into the sea. He appears in the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagavata Purana and the Harivamsha, always in the same role: the demon who tried to prevent a prophecy and was killed by it anyway. He commanded hundreds of illusion-spells learned from Maya Danava, the artificer of the demons.

Why did Sambara kidnap Pradyumna?

Sambara had learned that a son born to Krishna and Rukmini would kill him, so he stole the child from the birth chamber before the boy was ten days old and threw him into the ocean. The sources do not say how he came by the prophecy. A large fish swallowed the infant, the fish was caught and sold to Sambara’s own kitchen, and the child was found alive when the cooks cut it open.

How did Sambara die?

Pradyumna beheaded Sambara with a sword after neutralising his magic. Sambara fought with a club, then rose into the air and rained down mystic weapons, but Pradyumna countered every spell using the mahamaya vidya, a knowledge that defeats all other illusions, taught to him by Mayavati. The Vishnu Purana counts eight illusions, of which Pradyumna deflected seven and turned the eighth back on Sambara.

Who was Mayavati and why did she help Pradyumna?

Mayavati, also called Mayadevi, was the goddess Rati living in Sambara’s household while she waited for her husband Kama to be reborn after Shiva burned him to ash. She recognised the child recovered from the fish as Kama returned, raised him in secret, and when he was grown told him his true parentage and gave him the magic that killed Sambara. The Vishnu Purana calls her Sambara’s wife; the Bhagavata Purana makes her a maidservant in his kitchen, and Narada insists she was never really his wife at all.

Is the Sambara of the Rigveda the same demon?

No. The Rigveda names a Sambara whose ninety-nine forts Indra destroyed for the sake of the king Divodasa, and that figure is a Dasa chieftain and enemy of a Vedic ruler, not the shapeshifting asura of the Krishna story. The two share a name and nothing else in the record.