Dharaधर

Dhara (धर), the bearer or supporter, is the Vasu of the earth — one of the eight elemental gods who, in the classical reckoning, personify the frames of the visible world. His name is a common Sanskrit word for that which holds up, and as a divine person he is scarcely more than the earth-element given a seat among the Thirty-Three: the ground considered as a god, alongside his brothers of fire, wind, water, moon, pole star and the lights of dawn and sky.

In the tradition

Dhara has no hymns, no cult and no iconography of his own; he exists in lists and genealogies. The Purāṇas assign the Vasus a conventional parentage among the offspring of Daksha's daughters, and Dhara duly receives a wife and children in some accounts, details which vary from text to text. His one appearance in narrative is collective: he is among the eight Vasus who stole the sage Vasishtha's cow and were cursed to mortal birth, carried into the world and mercifully drowned in infancy by the goddess Ganga — the story with which the Mahābhārata opens the tale of Bhishma. As one of the seven lesser offenders, Dhara's exile among mortals lasted only moments.

Meaning

What Dhara chiefly attests is the old cosmological habit of the tradition: the impulse to give every constituent of the world a name and a place in the divine census. The earth as goddess belonged to Prithvi; the earth as element, filed among the eight Vasus, was Dhara.