Narakasuraनरकासुर

Narakasura, also called Bhauma, the son of the Earth, was the asura king of Pragjyotisha, a realm identified with ancient Assam. Puranic accounts make him the child of the earth goddess Bhudevi, in most tellings fathered by Vishnu in his boar incarnation, a parentage that lends his story its peculiar pathos: the god who slays him is bound to him by blood.

The story

Grown mighty and corrupted by power, Naraka plundered the worlds. He stole the earrings of Aditi, mother of the gods, seized Varuna's royal canopy, and imprisoned sixteen thousand and one hundred captive women in his citadel. At Indra's appeal Krishna flew to Pragjyotisha on Garuda, his wife Satyabhama beside him, broke the city's defences, slew the demon Mura, from whom he takes the name Murari, and killed Naraka with his discus. In some tellings it is Satyabhama, an incarnation of the Earth, who deals the blow. The captive women were freed, and Krishna took them under the protection of marriage; the earrings were restored to Aditi. Naraka's son Bhagadatta appears in the Mahabharata as the king of Pragjyotisha who fights, mounted on his war elephant, on the Kaurava side.

Naraka Chaturdashi

The demon's death is fixed in the festival calendar. Naraka Chaturdashi, the day before the new-moon night of Diwali, commemorates it; in much of southern India the day itself is Deepavali, greeted with a ritual oil bath before dawn, while in Goa effigies of Narkasur are paraded and burned. The lamps of the season are, in this strand of the tradition, lit for a tyrant's fall.

In Assam

In Assam the association is dynastic as well as mythic: the early rulers of Kamarupa traced their descent from Naraka and Bhagadatta in their inscriptions, and a hill near Guwahati bears his name. The demon of the pan-Indian festival is, in the Brahmaputra valley, something closer to a founding ancestor.