At dawn on Thaipusam in Kuala Lumpur, vast crowds climb the 272 steps to the Batu Caves beneath a golden statue of a young god holding a spear. In Tamil Nadu the cry "Vetri Vel, Veera Vel" rises from every hilltop temple. Yet in a Shiva temple in Varanasi the same god occupies a small shrine that most visitors walk past. He has many names: Kartikeya, Skanda, Subrahmanya, Kumara, Shanmukha, Saravanabhava, and in Tamil Murugan, the beautiful one. He is the elder son of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesha's brother, the general of the gods, and the boy who left home in a sulk and became the most loved deity in the Tamil world.
Born to destroy Tarakasura
The demon Taraka had won a boon that only a son of Shiva could kill him, and Shiva, grieving after Sati's death, sat in meditation with no intention of fathering anyone. The gods sent Kama, god of desire, to disturb him; Shiva burnt him to ash with his third eye. It was Parvati's own years of austerity that finally won him, and Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava, the birth of the prince, tells the story up to their wedding.
The birth itself is strange and deliberate. Shiva's seed was too fiery for any womb. Agni carried it, then Ganga, and at last it was laid among the reeds of a lake called Saravana, from which comes the name Saravanabhava, born in the reed thicket. Six babies appeared there, and the six Krittikas, the stars of the Pleiades, each nursed one. When Parvati found them she gathered all six into her arms, and they became a single boy with six faces and twelve arms. From the Krittikas he is Kartikeya; from the faces he is Shanmukha, Arumugam in Tamil. The devas made him their senapati, commander, and he killed Taraka.
The Tamil Kanda Puranam makes his chief enemy Surapadman, Taraka's brother. At the seaside temple of Tiruchendur, Surapadman became a mango tree to escape; Murugan's spear split it, and the two halves became a peacock and a rooster, which the god took as his mount and his banner. The vanquished enemy transformed and placed at the victor's feet is the Tamil way of saying that Murugan does not destroy his enemies; he converts them.
Six faces, the vel and the peacock
Devotees give several meanings to the six faces. They look in the six directions, so nothing escapes him. They drank the milk of six mothers, so he belongs to everyone. They match the six energy centres of the body below the crown. And the mantra Saravanabhava has exactly six syllables. Karthigai Deepam, when lamps are lit in every Tamil home and a great fire is kindled on the hill at Tiruvannamalai, falls on the full moon of Karthigai under the Krittika star and is linked to his birth.
Before the war with Surapadman, Parvati gave her son a spear, the vel. It is the heart of his worship, and in some shrines the vel alone stands on the altar. Tradition reads its shape as a lesson about knowledge: the point is sharp, so the intellect should be penetrating; the blade is broad, so learning should be wide; the shaft is long, so understanding should go deep. The vel is Shakti, his mother's power, in his hand, and the cry "Vel Vel" at his festivals is a call to that power.
The peacock beneath him grips a serpent in its claws, pride and desire kept under control. In the south he has two consorts: Devasena, daughter of Indra, given to him by the gods, and Valli, a hunter's daughter of the Kurava hill people, whom he wooed in disguise. Devotees see in them the Vedic and the folk, the formal path and the path of the heart, married to the same god. In Bengal, by contrast, Kartik is a handsome unmarried youth, and the north generally keeps him a bachelor, Kumara. The regions differ, and both traditions are old.
The fruit of knowledge and the hill of Palani
Every Tamil child knows the story. The sage Narada brought a mango to Kailasa, the jnana phalam, the fruit of knowledge, which could not be divided. Shiva and Parvati offered it to whichever son could circle the world first. Murugan leapt onto his peacock and set off. Ganesha walked once round his parents and said that they were his world. The fruit went to Ganesha, and when Murugan returned to find it gone he was furious. He threw off his silks, left Kailasa in a loincloth with a staff and settled on a hill in the Tamil country. His parents followed to console him. "You yourself are the fruit," they told him, pazham nee, and from those words, tradition says, comes the name Palani.
The god of Palani is Dandayudhapani, the young ascetic with a shaved head and a staff, whose image is said to have been made by the siddha Bhogar from nine medicinal substances. Pilgrims shave their heads there, and children's first tonsure is often done on the hill. The lesson is that the one who lost the fruit became the fruit: renunciation in a moment of loss turned a sulking boy into the god to whom the whole south comes for consolation.
The six abodes
The Sangam-era poem Tirumurugatruppadai, a guide for pilgrims to Murugan, already names his holy places, and tradition settled on six, the Arupadaiveedu, all in Tamil Nadu.
- Thiruparankundram near Madurai, where he married Devasena.
- Tiruchendur on the coast, where he defeated Surapadman.
- Palani, where he stands as the renunciate.
- Swamimalai, where as a child he explained the meaning of Om to his own father, earning the name Swaminathan, the lord who is teacher.
- Thiruthani, where he rested after the war and married Valli.
- Pazhamudircholai, a forest shrine near Madurai, where the poet Avvaiyar met him disguised as a cowherd boy who teased her with a riddle about roasted fruit.
Visiting all six is a pilgrimage many Tamil families complete over a lifetime.
Thaipusam, Skanda Shashti and the kavadi
Skanda Shashti falls on the sixth day after the new moon of Deepavali. Devotees fast for six days, and on the sixth the battle with Surapadman is enacted at Tiruchendur and in Murugan temples around the world, followed next day by his wedding to Devasena.
Thaipusam is the full moon of the month of Thai, in January or February, with the moon in the Pushya star: the day, tradition says, that Parvati gave him the vel. It is kept in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa and wherever Tamils have settled, and it is the day of the kavadi.
The kavadi is a burden carried for the god, and its story belongs to Palani. The sage Agastya asked his disciple Idumban to carry two hills from Kailasa to the south, slung on either end of a pole. When Idumban set them down to rest at Palani, a small boy sat on one and refused to move. They fought, Idumban fell, and Murugan restored him and promised that anyone who carried a burden to his hill in that way would be blessed. Today the kavadi ranges from a pot of milk carried on the head to decorated arches on the shoulders, and for some devotees to small vel-shaped skewers through the cheek or tongue, undertaken after weeks of fasting as the fulfilment of a vow. It is not a spectacle but a nerthikadan, a promised debt being repaid, and devotees ask that it be watched with respect.
The south and the north
Kartikeya is ancient and was once worshipped everywhere. Skanda is named in the Chandogya Upanishad, the Mahabharata tells his birth, Gupta emperors took the names Kumaragupta and Skandagupta, and the Skanda Purana, the largest of the Puranas, bears his name. But over the centuries his worship in the north faded to a corner of Shiva temples, with exceptions such as Kartik Puja in Bengal. In Karnataka and Andhra he is Subrahmanya, closely tied to serpent worship, with the great temple at Kukke. In Sri Lanka he is the god of Kataragama, revered by Buddhists as well as Hindus. And in Tamil Nadu he is Tamil kadavul, the Tamil god, because the Sangam poets had sung of a red-clad hill god named Murugan before the Puranic Skanda arrived, and the two became one. Arunagirinathar's Thiruppugazh in the fifteenth century and the Kanda Shashti Kavasam, recited in Tamil homes on Tuesdays, kept him at the centre of devotion. The six abodes make the Tamil land itself his body.
Bringing it home
- Treat the vel as a discipline: sharpen the mind, broaden the learning, deepen the roots.
- When you lose a race you thought you deserved to win, remember Palani. The one who walks away from the fruit can become the fruit.
- Carry your burdens to God on purpose, like a kavadi, rather than dragging them resentfully.
- Chant "Om Saravanabhava", six syllables for six faces, before a hard task.
- Tell children the story of the mango, and point out that Tamil temples place Ganesha at the entrance to Murugan's own shrine. The brothers are not rivals, and neither should the children be.