Anila (अनिल) is one of the Aṣṭa Vasus, the eight gods who personify the elemental constituents of the natural world and who are counted, alongside the eleven Rudras, the twelve Adityas and the two Ashvins, among the thirty-three gods of the Veda. His name is simply a Sanskrit word for wind, and in most texts he is closely identified with, or treated as an aspect of, Vayu, the wind god proper.
Among the Vasus
The Vasus are attendants of Indra in the older texts and figure in later literature chiefly as a group. Their standard enumeration assigns each to a natural phenomenon: earth, fire, wind, water or day, dawn, light, the moon and the pole star. Anila holds the portfolio of wind and, by extension, of breath, the wind within the body. He receives little independent worship and almost no mythology of his own; his significance is structural, as one of the powers whose combined working keeps the visible world in motion.
The curse of the Vasus
The Vasus appear collectively in the Mahabharata's opening book, where all eight are cursed by the sage Vasishtha to be born as mortals after one of them steals his wish-granting cow. Born to the river goddess Ganga by King Shantanu, seven of the brothers, Anila among them, are released from mortal life at birth; only the chief offender must live out a full human span, as Bhishma. The episode is the one moment at which these otherwise abstract deities step into narrative.
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.