Tārakāsura

A thousand years, his mother carried him. When Tarakasura finally arrived the ground buckled and the sea stood up off its bed, and his parents, according to the Padma Purana, were beside themselves with joy at the noise. It is a birth notice written in the grammar of catastrophe, and everything that follows keeps that promise.

The trouble began two generations earlier with a grudge. Diti, watching her sister Aditi’s sons occupy heaven, asked her husband Kashyapa for a child who could pull them down, and got Vajranga, whose limbs were the substance of the thunderbolt. He did exactly what she wanted. Indra was seized, bound and paraded, and then released alive on Brahma’s word, which Diti thought a worse humiliation than killing him. Vajranga, who insisted he had only obeyed his mother, went off to sit in penance, and Brahma made him a wife named Varangi as a reward. When she was offered a boon of her own she did not ask for happiness. She asked for a son who would take the three worlds.

He earned it the hard way, on the slopes of Mount Pariyatra. A hundred years without food. Another hundred on dried leaves, brittle things that cracked in his teeth and tasted of nothing. Then years on water alone, until the heat of the austerity was such that Brahma came down to make it stop, which is how these bargains usually end. Standing there in the thin mountain air, filthy, victorious, Taraka named his terms.

Two boons. That nothing in the three worlds should be his equal. And that his death, when it came, could only come from a son of Shiva. In the Padma Purana he sharpens it further and asks to be safe from everyone except a seven-day-old child of Shiva’s, which is either genius or a joke at the expense of fate. Shiva at that moment was a widower smeared in ash, sunk so deep in meditation that the idea of him fathering anything was faintly absurd. Brahma granted it. He usually does.

What followed was less a war than an eviction. Taraka took Svarga, threw the gods out of their own heaven and announced that he was the new Indra, and for a long stretch of cosmic time he simply held it. His court sat in a fortified city behind a copper rampart, and he kept a palace of a thousand storeys, and when Narada came as a herald with Indra’s insults in his mouth the demon was sitting in the middle of a crowd of women. He heard the message out. Then he stood up, raised a closed fist, and started walking, and the sage who had faced down worse admits in the Skanda Purana that he turned and ran.

The counter-plan was ugly and everybody knew it. If only Shiva’s son could kill him, Shiva would have to be talked out of his grief, so Kamadeva was sent to shoot the god of ascetics with a flower arrow while Parvati stood nearby. It worked, briefly. Then the third eye opened and there was nothing left of the love god but a smear of warm ash and a widow. Parvati went to the high places and undertook an austerity as savage as Taraka’s own, and won the marriage, and in time there was a six-faced child claimed at once by Shiva, by Parvati, by fire and by six stars.

Taraka fought the resulting war on his own terms with an army under Kalanemi behind him, and for a while it went the way it always had. The gods came on in ceremonial order with Yama on the left and the great weapons of Rudra travelling behind the chariots like a second army, and it did not matter. Then the demon opened his mouth, and that turns out to have been the fatal move.

The Shiva Purana gives him a long, gleeful speech before the last battle. He indicts Vishnu for cheating Bali out of the earth, for the trick played at the churning of the ocean, for killing a woman in the Rama incarnation and a monkey from behind a tree. He indicts Indra for cutting up Diti’s unborn child, for Ahalya, for the murder of Vritra. It is a good speech and much of it is true. It is also, the text says flatly, an act of censure by which Taraka dispossessed himself of his own merit, spending in one performance the credit that a hundred years of dried leaves had bought him. He talked himself to death.

Indra’s thunderbolt hit him a moment later and split him open, and he fell for the first time in his life. He got up. He put Indra on the ground with his spear, stood on him, and beat him with his own weapon. Vishnu’s discus knocked him flat and he got up and speared Vishnu. Virabhadra’s trident knocked him flat and he got up and speared Virabhadra through the chest. Each time the shout went round the divine army and each time it died in the throat.

The duel with Kumara was fought on foot, spear against spear, both of them using the same battle mantras, both wounded through the heart and still standing. The wind stopped. The sun went dim. Mountains came down from the range to watch, terrified for the boy, and he broke off to reassure them. A blow from Taraka knocked him senseless and he came back up. Then the spear went in, and the greatest asura of his age came apart at every joint and was still, and the child who killed him did not strike the body again.

The tellings disagree about the last instant, which is fitting for a death that was legislated in advance. The Shiva Purana keeps it simple and gives Kumara the spear. In the Skanda Purana a woman steps out of the demon’s own head first, announces that she is the Shakti who has lived in him since his great penance and that his unrighteousness has finally outweighed his righteousness, and leaves, and it is that abandoned power that Kumara drives into his chest. The Padma Purana has a missile that follows him wherever he runs.

His weakness was never his body, which had no equal, and was never courage, which he had in surplus. It was the exception clause he wrote himself, and the slow leak of merit that came from believing his own indictment of everyone else. His line did not end with him. Three sons survived him, Tarakaksha, Vidyunmali and Kamalaksha, and they built three flying cities and had to be burnt out of the sky by Shiva in person.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tarakasura in Hindu mythology?

Tarakasura is an asura king who conquered heaven and expelled the gods after receiving a boon from Brahma. He is the son of the asura Vajranga and Varangi, and he is best known as the enemy whose invincibility forced the marriage of Shiva and Parvati. He appears in the Shiva Purana, the Skanda Purana and the Padma Purana, and his story is the basis of Kalidasa’s court epic Kumarasambhava.

What boon did Tarakasura receive from Brahma?

Tarakasura asked that nothing in the three worlds should be his equal, and that he could be killed only by a son of Shiva. He chose the second condition because Shiva was then a grieving ascetic with no children and no apparent interest in having any. In the Padma Purana version he narrows it further and asks to be safe from all but a seven-day-old child of Shiva’s.

Who killed Tarakasura?

Kartikeya, also called Skanda or Kumara, the son of Shiva and Parvati, killed Tarakasura in single combat with a spear. Brahma told Kartikeya directly that no one else could do it, since his own boon made the demon proof against Indra, Vishnu and Virabhadra, all three of whom had already been knocked down by Taraka in the same battle.

Why did Tarakasura lose his power at the end?

The Shiva Purana says he destroyed his own accumulated merit by delivering a long public denunciation of Vishnu and Indra before the final fight. The moment that speech ended, Indra’s thunderbolt shattered him for the first time in his life. The Skanda Purana tells it differently and has the goddess Shakti leave his body outright, announcing that his unrighteousness had finally outweighed his righteousness.

Are Tarakasura and Tadaka the same being?

No. Tarakasura is a male daitya king slain by Kartikeya, while Tadaka is a rakshasi killed by Rama in the Ramayana, and the similar names cause frequent confusion. The Shiva Purana even has Tarakasura cite Rama’s killing of Tadaka as one of his charges against Vishnu, so the two figures appear in the same passage as separate beings.

Related Entries

Skanda, Tripurasura, Shiva, Parvati, Brahma, Indra, Vishnu, Rati, Ganesha, Aditi, Daitya, Asura, Hiranyakashipu, Ravana