Vaitarani

Twelve suns stand over the southern road and there is no shade on it anywhere. No tree to sit under, no water to drink, nothing growing that a traveller could eat. The dead walk it for six months before the ground tilts away and the smell arrives ahead of the view, hot metal and spoiled meat and the flat sweetness of a slaughter yard in summer. That is the first news anyone gets of the Vaitarani.

The Garuda Purana puts the width at a hundred yojanas and offers the figure without comfort. What moves in the channel is not water. It is pus and blood, roped over with hairy moss, so thick and slow that the far bank cannot be seen from the near one. The banks are heaped with bones, and the mud between the bones is made of flesh. Crocodiles lie half sunk in the shallows. The surface is busy with leeches and turtles and fish, and above them hang hundreds of birds with beaks the text calls adamantine, which is a polite way of saying that nothing they take hold of ever comes loose.

Most of the time the river simply sits there simmering, its birds settled along the bone ridges, its crocodiles patient. It does not need to hunt. The road delivers.

Then it notices someone coming. The account is unusually precise about this. Seeing the sinful approach, the river seethes like butter in a frying pan, throws up flames and smoke, and begins to roar. Souls faint at the sight of it, which does them no good at all, because the current takes the fallen down through hundreds of thousands of whirlpools into the region below, holds them there a moment, and brings them back up to do it again. The Purana states the purpose plainly. The river was made so that the sinful would fall into it.

The Bhagavata Purana files it differently, and the difference is worth having. There the Vaitarani is not a stage of a journey but one of twenty-eight named hells, and it works as a moat around the whole infernal country. It has a specialist clientele: men of good birth, kshatriyas and the officers of kings, people who had every advantage and broke the bounds of dharma anyway. They are thrown in and the animals of the river start on them at once. The flood they are bitten in is itemised without mercy, excrement and urine and pus and blood, hair, nails, bones, fat, flesh, marrow. They do not drown and they do not die. Their own sins keep them breathing so that the biting can continue.

The crossing itself comes six months into the walk, at a city called Chitrabhavana, where Yama’s younger brother Vichitra rules and where a traveller already running from the sight of him is met by fishermen. They are courteous about it. They have brought a boat, they say, for anyone who wishes to cross the great Vaitarani, if his merits are sufficient. Then they name the fare, and the naming of it is also the etymology: vitarana means a gift, and the river is called Vaitarani because a gift is the thing that carries you over. If the traveller gave a cow in life, the boat is his. If not, there is no boat.

What happens to the ones without a boat is not softened anywhere in the telling. The river seethes at them, they cry out, they sink. Yama’s messengers then fix a skewer through the lips and carry them over from above, the way a fish is carried on a hook.

All of which explains why the gift is made before death rather than after, and why it is still made. A dying person is helped to give away a cow, decorated for the purpose, to a brahmin, and where a living animal is impractical an equivalent in money stands in for it. In the older descriptions the soul does not ride at all but takes hold of the cow’s tail and is towed across. Either way the crossing is settled while the giver is alive to settle it. The Vaitarani is the rare toll gate that refuses to take payment at the gate.

The rest of the road is a slow year, and the living have work to do for all of it. The traveller goes seventeen days alone at the speed of wind and reaches the city of Saumya on the eighteenth. After that the rice-balls offered at home arrive month by month, each one a meal in a different terrible town: a city where stones rain down, a city where the clouds never stop, a city a hundred times colder than the Himalaya. Shoes, umbrellas, cloth and money are sent the same way, handed to a brahmin so that the traveller receives them somewhere out on the road. At the end of the year, at a place called Bahubhiti, the body the size of a hand is dropped, and the spirit that goes on into Yama’s city is the size of a thumb. It enters by the southern gate. The other three gates are for people whose year went differently.

There is also a Vaitarani that runs through ordinary daylight. The Mahabharata takes the Pandavas down the coast into Kalinga, where the sage Lomasa points out the river crossing that country and calls the northern bank fit for rites, and the brothers go down into the water and pour libations for their fathers. Rudra had made the place famous before them by seizing a sacrificial beast on that bank and announcing that it was his share, which the other gods considered poor form; they talked him round, honoured him properly, and from then on set aside the first and freshest portion of every offering for him. The river still runs. It is the Baitarani of Odisha, and the stretch through Jajpur is the holiest part of it, where families come to do for their dead what Yudhishthira did for his.

What the river can do is narrow and absolute. It cannot be argued with, forded, swum or bribed at the bank. It does not weigh grief or intention, and a soul who is extremely sorry at the water’s edge goes across on the hook like everyone else. Its limits are fixed just as hard. It has no hold whatever on a soul whose gift was made, and against a boat or a fistful of cow’s tail all that flame and roaring counts for nothing. It is a boundary and not a judge. The sorting happened earlier, in a life, by hand, one gift at a time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Vaitarani river in Hinduism?

The Vaitarani is the river the dead must cross on the road to Yama, the god of death. The Garuda Purana describes it as a hundred yojanas wide and running with pus and blood rather than water, with bones heaped on its banks and crocodiles, leeches and sharp-beaked birds waiting in and above it. The Bhagavata Purana treats it instead as one of twenty-eight hells, forming the moat around the infernal regions.

How does a soul cross the Vaitarani?

A soul crosses the Vaitarani by boat, and the boat is granted only to someone who gave away a cow while alive. At a city called Chitrabhavana, fishermen offer passage to the traveller whose merits are sufficient, and they explain that the river takes its name from vitarana, a gift, because a gift is what carries you over. A soul with no such gift sinks, and Yama’s messengers fix a skewer through its lips and carry it across like a fish on a hook.

What is the Vaitarani cow?

The Vaitarani cow is a cow given away near the moment of death, usually to a brahmin, specifically so that the dying person will have passage across the river. Where a live animal is impractical, an equivalent gift of money is substituted. In the older accounts the soul does not ride a boat at all but grips the cow’s tail and is towed over.

Who falls into the Vaitarani?

In the Bhagavata Purana the Vaitarani is reserved for men of noble birth, warriors and officers of kings, who had the standing to uphold dharma and broke it anyway. They are eaten by the aquatic animals of the river without dying, sustained in that state by their own sins. In the Garuda Purana the river is more general, taking anyone on the southern road who made no gifts in life.

Is the Vaitarani a real river?

There is a real river of the name, the Baitarani in Odisha, and Hindu tradition identifies it with the mythological one. The Mahabharata places it in the land of the Kalinga tribes and has the Pandavas bathe there and pour offerings for their fathers, on a bank where Rudra once claimed a sacrificial beast as his share. Families still perform rites for their dead along it, particularly at Jajpur.

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Yama, Sharvara and Shyama, Preta, Garuda, Ganga, Shiva, Makara, Vetala, Mount Meru (Sumeru), Charon, Hades, Lethe, Sheol, Duat, Hel