Devalok ← All gods
Also calledVishvakarmanVishwakarmaBiswakarmaVishvakritDevashilpi

At a glance

TraditionVedic
In the RigvedaEyes

faces, arms and feet on every side, and wings with which he welds heaven and earth together

Name"The one whose work is everything"

first a title of Indra and of the Sun, then a god

Who Vishvakarma is

In the Rigveda, Vishvakarman is a question more than a person. His name means "the one whose work is everything", and it comes only five times in the whole collection, all of them in the tenth and last book. Two hymns, 10.81 and 10.82, are his. Before them the word was a title, used once of Indra and once of the Sun.

The two hymns belong to the late poets who had begun to ask where the world came from. They do not picture a craftsman at a bench. They picture a maker who is also a priest and a seer, "our father", who sat down to a sacrifice and offered up everything that exists. He has eyes on every side, a face on every side, arms and feet on every side. He has wings as well, and with his arms and his wings he presses heaven and earth together the way a smith welds metal.

Then the poet asks what nobody can answer. What did he stand on while he did it? What was the wood, and what was the tree, from which heaven and earth were cut? He tells thoughtful people to ask this in their own minds.

The second hymn calls him the maker and the disposer, the one who gave the gods their names, the one whom all other beings go to with their questions. It speaks of a first seed that the waters held, in which all the gods were together, resting on the navel of the Unborn. And it ends with a warning to the singers: you will not find the one who made all this. Something else has come between you and him. The chanters wander about wrapped in mist, their lips stammering.

That is all the Rigveda says. It gives him no family, no weapon, no city built for anyone. The Brahmanas that follow treat the name as another name of Prajapati, the lord of creatures, and they remember a king called Vishvakarman Bhauvana who once offered up all he had, the earth itself included.

What was the wood, and what was the tree, from which they shaped the earth and the sky?

From the Vedas to the Puranas

What became of Vishvakarma

Vishvakarma is one of the few Vedic names that grew larger in the Puranas. The maker of the universe in Rigveda 10.81 and 10.82 became the craftsman and architect of the gods, took over the work that the Rigveda gives to Tvashtri, and is worshipped today, with a festival of his own, by people who work with tools and machines.

The change is complete by the time of the epics. In the Ramayana he has built the golden city of Lanka on its mountain by the southern sea, and the monkey Nala, who lays the bridge for Rama, is his son and has his skill. In the Mahabharata he builds the assembly hall of Yama, and at Brahma's order he shapes the maiden Tilottama out of the finest part of every jewel. The Bhagavata Purana (10.50) says his whole science could be seen in Krishna's sea city of Dwaraka.

The Puranas give him a family. The Vishnu Purana (1.15) makes him the son of Prabhasa, one of the eight Vasus, and of the sister of Brihaspati, and calls him the master of a thousand crafts by whose skill people earn their living. His daughter Sanjna marries the Sun. When she cannot bear her husband's heat, Vishvakarma puts the Sun on his lathe and grinds away an eighth of his brightness, and from the filings he makes the discus of Vishnu, the trident of Shiva and the lance of Kartikeya (Vishnu Purana 3.2). In the Rigveda that father-in-law was Tvashtri.

Two later stories show him at work. The Brahmavaivarta Purana tells how Indra kept him building a palace that was never grand enough, until a boy and a line of ants cured the king of heaven. At Puri in Odisha, tradition says the old carpenter who carved the images of Jagannath, and left them without hands and feet when the door was opened too soon, was Vishvakarma.

His festival is unusual in following the sun and not the moon. Vishvakarma Puja falls when the sun enters Virgo, the last day of the Bengali month of Bhadra, which is 17 September in most years. In Bengal, Odisha, Assam, Jharkhand and Nepal, factories and workshops stop, tools and machines are garlanded, and the sky over Kolkata fills with kites. Elsewhere he is honoured the day after Diwali. The craft communities who bear his name, carpenters, blacksmiths, metal casters, stonemasons and goldsmiths, count themselves the children of his five sons.

See how the Vedic gods became the Puranic ones →

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