Varahaवराह

Varaha, the boar, is the third of Vishnu's ten avatars. When the earth was dragged to the floor of the cosmic ocean, Vishnu took the form of a boar, an animal at home in water and mud, plunged into the deep, and raised her on his tusks. The image, a goddess resting on the tusk of a colossal beast rising from the waters, is among the most powerful in Hindu art, and it made Varaha a favourite emblem of kingship: the ruler, like the boar, lifts the earth from chaos and holds her secure.

The story

In the developed Purāṇic telling, the demon Hiraṇyākṣa, elder brother of the tyrant Hiraṇyakaśipu whom Narasimha would later destroy, seized the earth and carried her beneath the primordial waters. Vishnu issued forth as the boar, sought her in the deep, and bore her up, then slew Hiraṇyākṣa in a duel. The earth, personified as the goddess Bhūdevī, is in some traditions accounted Varaha's consort, and their union frames the earth's fertility as divine gift. Behind the demon-battle lies an older cosmogonic image: already in the Brāhmaṇa literature a boar raises the earth from the waters, a creation myth that the avatar doctrine later gathered to Vishnu.

Iconography

Varaha appears either as a wholly animal boar, often monumental and carved over with rows of sages and deities to show the cosmos borne in his body, or as a man with a boar's head, one tusk supporting or a raised arm cradling the small figure of the earth goddess. One foot commonly rests on the serpent of the deep. The great rock-cut relief at Udayagiri in central India, of the Gupta period, is the most celebrated early treatment, and the theme was taken up wherever dynasties wished to cast themselves as rescuers of the earth; the boar served as a royal crest, most famously of the Chalukyas and later of Vijayanagara.

Worship

Varaha receives worship chiefly within the wider Vaishnava frame rather than through an extensive cult of his own, though shrines to him exist, notably in the south, and his image guards the entrances of many Vishnu temples. His myth is recalled whenever the tradition speaks of the earth as rescued rather than owned: Bhūdevī is lifted, not taken, and the boar's labour in the mud remains the tradition's sternest image of divine condescension for the world's sake.