Devasदेव

The devas (देव) are the gods of Hindu cosmology considered as a class: the shining ones, from a root meaning to shine or give light, dwellers in svarga, the heaven above Mount Meru, with Indra as their king. The Vedic hymns address them by the traditional count of thirty-three — commonly parsed as the eight Vasus, eleven Rudras and twelve Adityas, with two more variously named — a figure later inflated in popular idiom to thirty-three crores. They preside over the workings of the world: Agni over fire, Varuna over the waters and the moral order, Surya over the sun, Vayu over the wind, receiving the offerings of sacrifice and returning rain, increase and protection.

Devas and asuras

The central drama of the class is its unending war with the asuras. In the Puranic genealogies the two hosts are half-brothers, sons of the sage Kashyapa by different mothers, contending for the three worlds age after age. The gods' most famous victory was won by partnership rather than force: at the churning of the ocean of milk, undertaken jointly with the asuras, the devas secured the amrita, the nectar of immortality, and with it their tenure of heaven. Yet even amrita does not make them supreme. Devas can be defeated, cursed by sages, unseated by austere mortals or ambitious demons; Indra's throne is proverbially insecure.

A rank, not an essence

Later Hindu thought made the devas' limits explicit. In the theistic traditions they are subordinate to the supreme deity — Vishnu, Shiva or the Goddess — and in the frame of karma and rebirth, godhood itself is a station: beings of great merit are reborn as devas, enjoy the long felicity of heaven, and fall again when their merit is spent. The Upanishads and the Gita treat worship of the devas as real but penultimate, yielding finite fruits. The class thus occupies a distinctive position in the architecture of Hindu thought — genuinely divine, ritually honoured to this day in temple and household rites, yet themselves creatures within the wheel, holding heaven on lease.