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Also calledGandharvaVishvavasuApsarasApsarases

At a glance

TraditionVedic
HomeThe high air and the vault of the sky; in the Atharvaveda also the waters and great fig and banyan trees
ChargeSoma

whose place in heaven the Gandharva guards

Who The Gandharvas and Apsarases is

In the oldest hymns there is hardly a tribe of Gandharvas at all. There is the Gandharva, one bright being high up in the air. The word comes about twenty times in the Rigveda, and only three of those speak of more than one.

He is hard to see clearly, and the poets seem to like him that way. He stands upright on the vault of the sky. He has bright weapons and wears a sweet-smelling robe. He measures out the middle air. He guards the place of Soma, the drink of the gods, and watches over the families of the gods. One hymn calls him Vishvavasu and asks him to help the singers tell true from false. In two hymns Indra is his enemy, which scholars connect with his jealous watch over Soma.

Beside him is the Apsaras, a woman of the waters. She smiles at her lover in the highest heaven. One hymn names the Gandharva in the waters and the water woman as the parents of the twins Yama and Yami. Another says that the long-haired wandering sage walks the path of the Apsarases and Gandharvas. Only one Apsaras has a name in the Rigveda. She is Urvashi, who lived four autumns with a human king and left him.

The Gandharva also comes to every wedding. A bride, the wedding hymn says, belongs first to Soma, then to the Gandharva, then to Agni, and only then to her husband. So Vishvavasu is honoured, and asked to get up and leave.

The Atharvaveda knows them as a crowd. It counts thousands of Gandharvas. They and their wives live in the big fig trees and banyans, where their lutes and cymbals can be heard. The Apsarases love dice and can give luck in play. Both can also trouble the mind, and there are charms to drive them off.

Scholars have guessed that the Gandharva was once the rainbow, or the moon, or a spirit of wind or cloud. The hymns do not settle it. Macdonell concluded only that he was a bright being of the sky, sometimes thought of as living in the waters with his wife.

Upright he has climbed the sky, the Gandharva, his bright weapons turned toward us. He wears a fragrant robe, lovely to look at.

From the Vedas to the Puranas

What became of The Gandharvas and Apsarases

The Gandharvas became the musicians of heaven. The single bright guardian of the Rigveda turned, in the epics and Puranas, into a whole people with kings, wives, forests and horses, who sing in Indra's court while the Apsarases dance.

The Brahmanas show the change beginning. In the Shatapatha Brahmana the Gandharva Vishvavasu steals Soma as it is being carried down from the sky. The gods know that the Gandharvas are fond of women, so they send the goddess Speech to win it back. Each side then tries to keep her. The Gandharvas recite the Veda to her, and the gods invent the lute and sing. The same text tells the full story of Urvashi and Pururavas, in which the Gandharvas trick a king out of his wife and then teach him the fire that makes him one of themselves.

In the Mahabharata they are a nation. One Gandharva king bars Arjuna's way at the Ganga by night, loses the fight, and becomes his friend. Another Gandharva, Chitrangada, kills a young Kuru king of the same name after a three-year battle at Kurukshetra. Chitrasena, a friend of Arjuna, captures Duryodhana in the forest on Indra's orders. Vishvavasu is now a king, and the father, by the nymph Menaka, of the girl Pramadvara.

The Puranas give them work in the sky. The Vishnu Purana says that in every month of the year a Gandharva rides on the chariot of the sun and sings before it, while an Apsaras dances. It names Tumburu, Narada, Haha, Huhu, Vishvavasu, Chitrasena and others, month by month, with Menaka, Urvashi, Rambha and Tilottama among the nymphs. Macdonell notes that a mirage came to be called a city of the Gandharvas.

The Apsarases changed as well. The water women of the Veda became the dancers of Indra's court, who are sent down in story after story to distract a sage from his discipline. Kalidasa made Urvashi the heroine of a play.

There are no temples to the Gandharvas, and no festival is theirs. They live on in the stories, as the singers at the edge of every scene in heaven.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

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