The Boar of Shiva's Garden

Long ago, on Kailasa, Shiva and Parvati kept a garden, and it was the loveliest garden in the three worlds. Trees bent with fruit, and the beds were full of sweet roots and flowers that never closed.

One day a wild boar broke into it from the forest and died there among the flowers, and beside her body was a tiny piglet, squealing. Parvati heard it. She picked it up, and it pushed its snout against her and stopped crying.

"Leave it," said Shiva. "It is a wild thing. It will grow up wild."

"It has no mother," said Parvati. "I will be its mother." She fed it with her own hands and let it follow her about the garden, and it was the happiest piglet that ever lived.

It grew. Its back grew a bristling ridge and its jaw grew two curved tusks, and one morning Shiva walked out into the garden and found it in ruins. The roots had been dug up and eaten. The young trees had been knocked flat. The beds were furrows of black earth, and in the middle of it all stood the boar, chewing.

Shiva took up his bow. "I told you," he said to Parvati. "Now I will do what should have been done at the start."

Parvati stepped between them. "You will not kill him. I raised him. He did only what a boar does."

"He has destroyed the garden of the gods."

"Then send him where digging is wanted," said Parvati. "Let him have a place of his own."

Shiva lowered the bow and thought, and then he called the boar to him. "Go down to the earth," he said, "to the coast where the rice grows between the hills and the sea. The people there will need a guardian for their fields and their cattle and their houses. Guard them. Settle their quarrels and punish those who cheat. They will give you a seat in their houses and feed you, and once a year they will call you down with drums, and you will speak to them."

The boar bowed his tusked head, and went down from Kailasa, and came to Tulu Nadu, and became Panjurli.

In Tulu Nadu they still give him his seat. Every guttu house has a place for the daiva, and when the harvest is in, the village calls him down. The drums go all night. The dancer is painted and dressed in fronds of young coconut leaf, with a great boar mask over his face. When Panjurli comes into him, he grunts and roots and tosses his head like the boar in Parvati's garden.

Then he sits down and listens to the village's troubles, and gives his judgment, and promises to keep watch over the fields for one more year.

The paddanas of Panjurli are many, more than fifteen by one scholar's count, and they do not all begin on Kailasa.

In one, two wild boars, a brother and a sister, lived in the forests of the Western Ghats above the coast. They went to the god Subrahmanya at his temple in the hills and asked for his blessing, and he gave it. In time the sister bore four young. One of them wandered up to the garden of the gods, and the story goes on as it does in the Kailasa telling, with the ruined garden, the angry god and the pleading goddess.

In some of these paddanas the young boar is not spared at all. Shiva kills him for the ruined garden, and it is Parvati's grief that brings him back, not as an animal but as a spirit. "You took my child," she tells Shiva, "so give him a place where he is worshipped." Shiva gives him the coast.

In another, the first boar was born from a drop of Vishnu's sweat that fell on the earth, which is why some families call Panjurli by a name that ties him to Vishnu.

The paddanas also tell of what came after. When the boar reached the earth, he was given a partner spirit, and a place in each village, and a share of the harvest. Some say he came down with Guliga, the fierce one, and that the two still keep their posts side by side at many shrines. Every family that keeps Panjurli has its own paddana, and the singer sings that family's version on the night of their kola.