Kamadevaकामदेव

Kamadeva (कामदेव) is the Hindu god of love and desire, archer of the heart: his bow is a stalk of sugarcane strung with a line of honeybees, his five arrows are tipped with five flowers, and his mount is a parrot. He rides with his consort Rati, goddess of pleasure, and his friend Vasanta, the spring, whose season is his armoury. His names describe his method — Manmatha, 'churner of the mind', Madana, 'the intoxicator'. Behind the charming iconography stands one of the oldest ideas in Indian thought: the Rig Veda's creation hymn names kama, desire, as the first seed of mind, the primal stirring by which the One became many. The love god is that cosmic force given a bow and a smile.

The burning

Kama's defining myth is his own destruction. The demon Taraka could be slain only by a son of Shiva, and Shiva sat in fathomless meditation, beyond all approach. The desperate gods sent Kama to wake desire in him as Parvati stood near. Spring came out of season; Kama drew his flower bow — and Shiva, disturbed, opened his third eye and burned the god of love to ash where he stood. From that moment Kama is Ananga, 'the bodiless': desire without form, present everywhere precisely because he is nowhere. Moved by the lament of Rati, Shiva relented so far as to promise him a second birth, and the Puranas deliver it — Kama returns as Pradyumna, son of Krishna and Rukmini, slays his demon abductor Sambara and is rejoined with Rati.

Worship and survivals

Kamadeva's independent cult was never large — the tradition preferred to fold desire into larger gods — but his festivals survive in the spring. In parts of South India the burning of Kama is remembered at Kaman Pandigai around the full moon of Phalguna, and regional traditions connect the bonfires of the Holi season with his ashes. Poets never let him go: in Sanskrit and the vernaculars alike, the whole vocabulary of love-longing — the five arrows, the mango blossom, the untimely spring — is his arsenal, catalogued and deployed for two thousand years.