Ditiदिति

Diti (दिति) is the mother of the Daityas, the elder race of antigods, and the mirror-image of her sister Aditi, mother of the devas. Her name appears to be a back-formation from Aditi's — the bounded against the boundless — and in the Purāṇic scheme the two sisters, daughters of Daksha and wives of the sage Kashyapa, divide the moral cosmos between their children: from Aditi the gods, from Diti their perpetual rivals. She is a marginal figure in the Veda itself; her stature belongs to classical mythology, where she stands at the head of one of its great genealogies.

Her sons

Diti's most famous children are the brothers Hiranyaksha, who dragged the earth beneath the ocean and was slain by Vishnu as the boar Varaha, and Hiranyakashipu, the persecutor of his own son Prahlada, destroyed by Vishnu as the man-lion Narasimha. Through them the Daitya line runs on to Prahlada's grandson Bali, the virtuous demon king humbled by the dwarf Vamana. The pattern of her lineage is thus woven through the avatar myths of Vishnu: age after age, a son of Diti rises and heaven must answer.

The forty-nine winds

One further story attaches to her directly. Grieving for her slain sons, Diti practised austerities to obtain a child who would overthrow Indra. Indra, watching for his chance, entered her womb and cut the embryo into forty-nine pieces; when the fragments wailed he soothed them — do not weep, mā rudata — and the pieces became the Maruts, the wind gods, who joined the very god they were conceived to destroy. In this tradition the mother of the demons is also, by a final irony, mother of Indra's own storm-troop.