Visakhapatnam probably gets its name from Vishakha, twin of Kartikeya. The Mahabharata tells the story. Kartikeya had defeated Taraka, Indra’s enemy. An insecure Indra, struck Kartikeya with his vajra, viewing him as a potential rival. From the wound emerged Vishakha, frightening Indra even more. Kartikeya reassured the king of the Devas that he did not seek the throne of paradise. He was content as Mahasena, commander of Indra’s army. Devasena, “army” personified as a woman, became his wife!
Kartikeya’s story splits along regional lines. In the North, he makes women widows in war. Women are told to avoid him. To make himself unattractive, he sheds his skin, smears himself with ash. He was the first Vedic monk-warrior, precursor of the Nath-jogis, sometimes identified with peacock-riding boy-sage Balaknath of Himachal.
But in Tamil Nadu, he stands on the Palani hills of the Western ghats as Shanmughan, six-headed virile son of the six stars that constitute Krittika Nakshatra, the Pleiades constellation. The rooster appears on his banner. He carries a spear, rides a peacock that fights snakes, and is tied to Mars, planet of aggression. Here he woos and marries Valli, a tribal woman, rather than renounces.
Was he the northern god transformed? Or was he a southern god draped in northern vocabulary?
Two thousand years ago, Tamil poets spoke of Seyon, the red god of the kurinji hills: hunter, warrior, lover. His priest, the velan, danced with a spear while devotees fell into trance. Blood, meat, animal sacrifice, these were his rites. There are no stories of his parents. But he was sometimes linked to Kotravai, goddess of the wilderness. Multiple tangled versions of Kartikeya’s birth appear in the North Indian Sanskrit work, Mahabharata, composed around the same time as the Tamil poems.
One version: Agni spills seed on seeing six of the seven wives of the seven sages. His wife Svaha carries this to a Himalayan lake. Six seeds fuse into one six-headed child. The wives are wrongly accused of infidelity. The child accepts them as mothers regardless, and warns that harming them brings miscarriage on the guilty.
Another version: Shiva’s seed is too fierce to hold. It burns Agni, boils the river-goddess Ganga, sets fire to a reed forest. Six babies rise from the ash, nursed by Krittika, merged by Parvati into one.
First, Kartikeya is son of Vedic Agni. Later he is son of post-Vedic Shiva. Either way, the Vedic gods need this wild child of the stars to keep their paradise. This northern Skanda moved south. Ikshvaku temples near the Kaveri delta held him first 1,700 years ago. Pallava temple art in Kanchi, 1,400 years ago, made him son of Shiva and Uma. His image even reached Cambodia. But this Kartikeya was not quite the Tamil Murugan.
Murugan belonged to mountains, hunters, romance, possession. Women left their homes for him. He was not celibate. How did this meat-loving wild god become Subrahmanya (beloved of Brahmins), a cherubic vegetarian deity? Did it have something to do with Brahmin migration to the south?
Those familiar with North India’s ‘kawad’ processions dedicated to Shiva, at the start of the monsoons, are often unfamiliar with Thaipoosam, the ‘kavadi’ festivals of South India, during the winter rains, dedicated to Murugan. Both festivals involve the shoulder sling with pots on either side. The northern ritual involves carrying Ganga water. The southern ritual involves carrying milk and ash. In both cases, the pots must not be placed on the ground until the destination is reached.
The south remembers this ritual as the journey of Hidimba, an asura who carried Himalayan mountain peaks and rivers south, accompanying Agastya. Shiva and Shakti had sent Agastya to make peace with their estranged son. The story remembers a real migration, when Shiva-adoring Brahmins broke away from with their northern Vedic counterparts and made the perilous journey south of the Tropic of Cancer, causing the Vindhya mountains to bend. They referred to southern mountains as Dakshina Kailasa and southern rivers as Dakshina Ganga.
The migrants were Brahmins, who received Brahmadeya land grants from Pallava and Chola kings. In return, they gave these kings solar and lunar dynasty lineages. Buddhism, Jainism, Brahminism, and Shiva worship, all came from the North. While Buddhists and Jains saw subaltern gods as inferior to their hermit-teachers, Brahmins saw local gods as manifestations of the supreme principle of the Vedas. By equating a local mountain god with Indra’s own general, they Brahmins successfully endeared themselves to the local kings, and triumphed over their monastic rivals. Kings loved the world-affirming tales of Shiva’s marriage and Skanda’s battles. The Buddhist and Jains restrictive dietary rules, however, persisted. Not simply to demonstrate restraint but to also enable purification.
Brahmin presence in the South is under 2,000 years old. They migrated reluctantly, in the footsteps of the Buddhist and the Jains, probably in the wake of the Huna invasions that destroyed the northern trade routes. They carried the Z-93 Steppe gene, which had entered North India over 3,000 years ago. They also brought with them Sanskrit grammar, and the Raj-mandala model of kingship, helping chieftains across South India and Southeast Asia build temple-centred kingdoms on a new hierarchy: purity.
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