Gandharva — Gandharva — is the celestial musician of Hindu myth: a class of male nature-spirits and demigods who are the singers and instrumentalists of the gods’ court, masters of the secret lore of soma and medicine, guardians of the heavenly realms, and the consorts of the apsaras. Half-divine, often part-bird or part-horse in older descriptions, the gandharvas are the very voice of heaven’s pleasure — and the namesakes of the love-match made for love alone.
Singers of the Gods
The gandharvas dwell in the heaven of Indra, where they make the music to which the apsaras dance, filling Svarga with song and the air with fragrance — their name is connected by folk-etymology to gandha, scent. In the Vedas a single Gandharva guards the celestial soma, the elixir of the gods, and knows the deepest secrets of the heavens and of the sacred plants; the gandharvas are keepers of esoteric and medical knowledge, and physicians invoke them. They are ruled by kings such as Chitraratha, “he of the bright chariot,” the foremost of the gandharva-lords, who appears in the epics teaching and testing mortal princes.
Music, Magic, and the Mirage
The gandharvas are associated with illusion and the insubstantial. The shimmering, vanishing cities sometimes seen in the sky or over deserts are called gandharva-nagara, “cities of the gandharvas” — the Sanskrit term for a mirage, and a favourite philosophical image for the unreal, dreamlike nature of the phenomenal world. Skilled in maya, they can be capricious; some tales make them jealous guardians who quarrel with mortals who trespass on their groves or waters.
The Gandharva Marriage
The gandharvas’ most enduring legacy is the gandharva vivaha, the “gandharva marriage” — one of the eight classical forms of Hindu marriage, and the one founded purely on mutual love and desire, contracted by the consent of the couple alone without rites, dowry, or the approval of parents. It is the love-match, the elopement of the heart; the great example is the secret union of King Dushyanta and Shakuntala in the forest. That the most romantic and least formal of marriages bears the gandharvas’ name reflects their nature as spirits of beauty, music, and untrammelled love.
Kin and Counterpart
The gandharvas are the male counterpart to the female apsaras, their eternal partners in heaven. They overlap with the kinnaras (the half-bird celestial musicians) and the yakshas (the nature-spirits of Kubera), and in Buddhist cosmology the gandharvas (Pali gandhabba) become a recognised class of heavenly beings and even the spirit awaiting rebirth. In Zoroastrian myth a related Gandarewa is a monstrous water-dragon — a reminder of the gandharva’s ancient, ambiguous, half-wild origins beneath his later role as the polished minstrel of the gods.