Surya

The stone Surya in a north Indian temple niche wears boots. Not sandals, not the bare divine feet that every other figure in the building displays without embarrassment, but heavy riding boots to the knee, worn with a close-fitting coat and a belt drawn tight at the waist. He is dressed for a cold country he never came from. The sculptural manuals insist on it: the sun is to be shown in northern dress, legs covered, coat and girdle, and Varahamihira’s astronomical compendium adds that the installation of a Surya image should be handled by the Maga priests, since they worshipped him first. Those priests were Magi, Iranian in origin, absorbed into the Brahman order, and they carried their own sun cult in with them. The oldest god of the Indian sky acquired a foreign wardrobe and kept it.

There is a second explanation for the covered feet, and it is the better story. The feet are hidden because nobody can look at them.

He arrives in the Rigveda already ancient. Ten hymns belong to him outright, and he moves through the rest as the eye of Mitra, Varuna and Agni, the organ by which the gods watch what happens down here. Around him crowds a whole family of solar names that later thinking would fold into one figure: Savitr the impeller, who holds eleven hymns of his own and turns up something like a hundred and seventy times; Pushan the beneficent; Bhaga, who hands out shares; Aryaman; and Vivasvat, from whom the human race is descended. In the earliest layer these are not quite the same god. By the time the Puranas are written, they are.

The image that survived all of it is the chariot. Seven horses draw it, or one horse with seven heads, depending on which account you follow, and the reins belong to Aruna, whose name means the red one. He is also, in the epic telling, an accident. His mother Vinata cracked her egg open too early out of impatience, so he came out half-formed and cursed her for it, while his brother Garuda hatched at the proper hour and grew into the eagle that carries Vishnu. Aruna got the driver’s bench instead. Every morning he takes the reins in the dark, the horses shift in their harness, and the red comes up over the rim of the world well before any of the heat does.

The sculptural type settled under the Gupta kings between the third and sixth centuries and barely moved afterwards. Surya stands straight on an open lotus or rides, a lotus held in each hand, a disc of light behind his head. He does not fight. He does not dance. He stands there with his flowers and his halo and his boots, and he looks out.

The domestic story is older and stranger than the temple images let on. Rigveda 10.17 opens on a loss: Saranyu, daughter of the craftsman Tvashtr, has been married to Vivasvat and has gone. The gods hid the immortal Saranyu from mortals, the hymn says, and gave her husband a substitute made in her likeness. That is nearly all it says. It never explains why she left, and the commentaries and Puranas spent centuries filling in the silence.

The Markandeya Purana’s answer is heat. Sanjna, daughter of the divine architect Vishvakarma, cannot endure her husband’s brilliance. She builds a double out of her own shadow, names her Chhaya, tells her to take her place in the house, and goes north to Uttarakuru, where she becomes a mare and grazes. The sun god was too hot to live with. When Surya works out what has happened he follows her in the shape of a stallion, and out of that meeting come the Ashvins, the twin horsemen who ride ahead of the dawn and mend what is broken.

So he goes to his father-in-law and asks to be made bearable. Vishvakarma puts the sun on a lathe and cuts away a portion of his brilliance, and the shavings are not swept up: from them come the discus that Vishnu throws, the trident that Shiva carries, and the staff of Yama, who judges the dead. Three of the most dangerous objects in the pantheon are offcuts from a husband being filed down so his wife will come home. The feet were left untouched. That is why the sculptors cover them.

His children make an uneven set. Yama, the first mortal to die and therefore king of the dead, with his sister Yami. Manu, ancestor of the present human age. The Ashvins from the horse union. And Karna, born to the unmarried princess Kunti in the Mahabharata when she tested a mantra and found the sun standing in front of her, delivered with golden armour fused to his skin, set adrift on a river and raised by a charioteer, killed decades later by a half-brother he did not know he had. Hanuman came to Surya wanting to be taught and was told the sun cannot stop for lessons, so he learned the whole curriculum travelling backwards at the same speed, facing his teacher.

Konark, on the Odisha coast, took the metaphor at its word. The thirteenth-century temple built under Narasimhadeva I is the chariot itself: twenty-four carved stone wheels ranged along the plinth in twelve pairs, some of them still workable as sundials, with a team of stone horses at the front hauling the whole sanctuary east. Salt wind has been at it for seven hundred years. The main tower has fallen, and what stands is a ruin that is still recognisably a cart meant to move.

Independent sun worship thinned out after that. Surya kept his place as first of the nine grahas, the planetary powers whose panels sit over temple doorways and whose moods astrologers are paid to manage. He did not vanish into astrology, though. Across Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, Chhath is still kept over four days and belongs to no image and no shrine. Observers hold a thirty-six hour fast without water, carry bamboo winnowing trays loaded with wheat-and-jaggery thekua, sugarcane, coconut and betel leaf down to the river, and stand in it knee-deep while the sun goes down. Then they come back in the dark and stand in the same cold water waiting for it to return.

What he does is simple and total. He makes the day and the year, he gives health and drives off sickness and the things that collect in darkness, and he sees everything, which is why oaths and paternity are sworn in front of him. Nothing hides from a witness at that height.

The limits come out of the same fact. He cannot be approached, and the remedy for that was surgical rather than moral: part of him had to be cut off and handed to other gods as weaponry before his own household could function. He cannot stop either. The route is fixed, the horses do not rest, and the sun ends up the least free being in the pantheon, tied to a timetable he did not set and cannot alter, with the one portion of himself that was never reduced still too bright to be shown, kept behind stone boots in every image where he stands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Surya in Hindu mythology?

Surya is the sun god of Hindu tradition and the sun itself, described in the Rigveda as the eye of Mitra, Varuna and Agni. Ten hymns of the Rigveda are addressed to him directly. Over time he absorbed an older group of Vedic solar deities including Savitr, Pushan, Bhaga, Aryaman and Vivasvat, so that names that once belonged to separate powers came to describe one god.

Why is Surya shown wearing boots?

Indian sculptural manuals require Surya to be depicted in northern dress, meaning a close-fitting coat, a girdle and high boots covering the legs, a convention traced to Iranian influence on his cult. Varahamihira’s astronomical compendium even directs that his images be installed by the Maga priests, Magi of Iranian origin absorbed into the Brahman order. A second traditional explanation says the feet are covered because Vishvakarma left them untrimmed and they are too brilliant to be looked at.

What do Surya’s seven horses mean?

Surya’s chariot is drawn by seven horses, or in some accounts by a single horse with seven heads, and the horses are commonly explained as the seven days of the week. The chariot is driven by Aruna, “the red one”, who is the reddish light that appears before sunrise. Aruna is the brother of Garuda and was born half-formed after his mother Vinata broke open his egg too early.

Who are Surya’s children?

Surya’s children include Yama, the first mortal to die and the king of the dead, his sister Yami, and Manu, the ancestor of the current human age. The twin Ashvins were born when Surya took the form of a stallion and followed his wife Saranyu, who had fled him in the form of a mare. In the Mahabharata he also fathers Karna on the unmarried princess Kunti, who is born wearing golden armour fused to his body.

Is Surya still worshipped today?

Yes. Surya’s independent cult declined and he was absorbed into the Navagraha, the nine planetary deities, but direct sun worship survives in the festival of Chhath, kept over four days in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. Observers fast for thirty-six hours without water and stand knee-deep in rivers to make offerings to the setting and the rising sun. The great medieval monument to him, the thirteenth-century Sun Temple at Konark, was built as his chariot in stone.

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