Ganasगण

The ganas are the attendant hosts of Shiva, the motley troops who throng Kailasa and accompany the god in his wanderings. The Sanskrit word gana simply means a troop or multitude, and in the Veda the term already attaches to the hosts of Rudra. In the Puranic world these hosts acquire personality: squat, pot-bellied, sometimes animal-headed, by turns grotesque and merry, dancing and drumming in Shiva's train. Ganesha's most common name, Lord of the Ganas, records his appointment as their commander; Nandikeshvara and the fierce Virabhadra, who led the ganas in the destruction of Daksha's sacrifice, are also numbered among their chiefs.

Character and form

The ganas embody Shiva's association with the unruly margins of the ordered world. They are also called pramathas, the churners or tormentors, and early texts treat them with a certain wariness. Yet in art they are overwhelmingly genial. Temple sculpture across India sets them in friezes along plinths and lintels: dwarfish figures straining under the weight of the storey above, playing drums and flutes, tumbling, grimacing, carrying garlands. They supply Indian temple architecture with much of its humour.

Meaning

As a class the ganas dramatise a persistent theme of Shaiva religion: that the god of ascetics keeps company with beings the orthodox world excludes. Their loyalty is absolute, their appetite for revelry unembarrassed, and their presence around Shiva marks his court as one where conventional hierarchies do not hold.