Yama, Sāvitri, Bhūdevi and the Possibilities of Collective Death

This paper explores Hindu conceptualizations of death, from one individual being’s death to the all-inclusive death of many beings, both human and non-human. Engaging with three stories involving Yama, the god of death in Hinduism and Bhūdevi, the earth goddess, this argument imagines conceptualizing the causes of climate change in the Anthropocene and their possible solutions. The first story is located in the Upanishads, and centers on Nachiketa, a sixteen year old boy, who goes to Yama’s house to discuss the meanings of death with him. Through Nachiketa’s dialogue with Yama in the Katha Upanishads, we get a glimpse into an apotheosis of an individual soul’s desire. 

The second story in the Mahābhārata, heroizes princess Sāvitri and her chosen husband, Satyavan. Chasing Yama, right after Satyavan dies, Sāvitri dialogues with Yama, outwitting him on her husband’s future existence. Through Sāvitri we learn of the possibility of outwitting an individual’s death, even with the one of the most fearsome Hindu gods, Yama. 

The third story centers on the experiences of the goddess Bhūdevi and the evil demon, Hiranyaksha, who has submerged Bhūdevi to the bottom of the sea. Her call for help results in the creation of the third avatar of Vishnu, Varāha. He subsequently rescues Bhūdevi by fighting Hiranyaksha for a thousand years. These three Hindu stories are analyzed through prisms of mythic transformations of self, desire, and evil and expanded from the lone individual’s dealing with impending death to the imagination of a collective self dealing with the possibility of death and extinction. 

This paper attempts to translate these mythical stories into contemporary times as glimpses into the transformation of an individual to a collective apotheosis of desire in the last two hundred years. It argues that these stories can act as mythical examples of an epochal consciousness as articulated by the climate historian, Dipesh Chakarabarty. For example, Chakarabarty states: “Epochal consciousness, in each case, was thus tied to the question of­ humans’ perceived capacity to proj­ect themselves into the world as collective, sovereign agents. Epochal consciousness is both a form of thought and a genre of writing, for the form could find its fully formed expression only in writings that sought to grapple with this consciousness” (Chakrabarty 2015, 144). 

This paper will attempt to translate these three mythical stories into contemporary times as glimpses into the transformations of an individual to a collective apotheosis of desires in the last two hundred years, especially in the last eighty years, after WWII, when the modern imagination of development got yoked with an ever expanding consumption of high voltages of energy, which required the increased use of carbon, which, in turn, began heating the planet. Desire itself has been transfused into a kind of project of competition, mass desires, high cost consumption, in order to become a contemporary human being. These three stories and others who have kinship with them may have a capacity to act as mythical examples of transformations of epochal consciousness articulated. How can these kinds of forms of mythical stories in Hinduism be transformed into stories of epochal consciousness? This paper is a kind of retrieval of powerful stories which could transform Hindu conceptualizations of the meaning of death—from the one individual being’s death to the all-inclusive death of many beings, both human and non-human. It extends and stretches Hindu notions of death to the planetary, geological, Anthropocene setting. 

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The ­ Human Condition in the Anthropocene. The Tanner Lectures in ­ Human Values. Yale University. February 18–19, 2015.