Anala (अनल) is the Vasu of fire: one of the eight elemental gods of the classical lists, in which each Vasu personifies a constituent of the visible cosmos. The name is a familiar Sanskrit word for fire, and in most contexts it is simply an epithet of Agni himself; as a Vasu, Anala is fire considered as element — one compartment of the world's structure — rather than Agni the ritual god, the priest of the sacrifice with his vast Vedic cult. Some enumerations of the Vasus indeed write Agni where others write Anala, and the tradition treats the two names as interchangeable.
In the tradition
Like his brothers, Anala exists in lists rather than stories. The Purāṇas supply the Vasus with genealogies among Daksha's descendants, and some accounts give Anala offspring connected with fire, the details varying between texts. His single narrative appearance is shared: he is one of the eight Vasus cursed by the sage Vasishtha for the theft of his cow and born of the goddess Ganga to King Shantanu — a story the Mahābhārata tells to account for Bhishma, the eighth and chief offender. The seven others, Anala among them, were released from mortal life at birth.
Meaning
Anala's interest is taxonomic: he marks the point where the tradition's inventory of the cosmos and its pantheon of great gods overlap. Fire appears twice in the divine census — once as Agni, person and priest, and once as Anala, element and Vasu — and the doubling is a small window onto how the old cosmology was assembled.
Further reading
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press, 2007
- Lipner, Julius. Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge, 2010
- Stietencron, Heinrich von. Hindu Myth, Hindu History. Permanent Black, 2005
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.