Kinnarasकिन्नर

The kinnaras (किन्नर) are celestial musicians of the Indian cosmologies, beings poised between human and animal form. Their Sanskrit name is glossed as a question — kim nara, what sort of man? — and the tradition answered it variously: in much Hindu literature they are figured with human bodies and horses' heads, and are closely identified with the kimpurushas; in Buddhist tradition and the arts of Southeast Asia they became half-bird — human above, bird below — the form in which they are best known today. In all versions they belong to the Himalayan north, singing and playing in the trains of Kubera, god of wealth, on Mount Kailasa and about Mount Meru, and they are counted among the semi-divine classes alongside gandharvas, yakshas and nagas. In Jain cosmology they form one of the orders of vyantara deities.

The devoted pair

What distinguishes the kinnaras among the celestial hosts is not power but constancy. They are imagined in pairs — kinnara and kinnari — lovers and musicians inseparably joined, and the literature makes them emblems of mutual devotion; Buddhist story and poetry dwell on kinnari heroines, such as Manohara of the jataka tradition, whose tale of capture, loss and reunion with a human prince spread across Asia. Kinnara couples appear in the reliefs of Sanchi and Bharhut and throughout later temple art, singing with lute in hand.

Across the Indosphere

Few of the celestial classes travelled as well. The kinnari, bird-bodied and crowned, became a beloved figure of Thai, Khmer, Burmese and Indonesian art; her dance survives in the classical repertoires of Southeast Asia, and gilded kinnara images stand guard in the temple courts of Bangkok. In the Himalayan world a district of Himachal Pradesh, Kinnaur, preserves the old belief that the high valleys bordered the kinnaras' country. In modern Indian usage the word acquired a separate life as a respectful term for transgender communities — a reminder that the beings between categories have never left the language.