Gandharva गन्धर्व

What a gandharva is

A gandharva (feminine gandharvi) is a celestial being of beauty and music. Gandharvas sing and play at the festivals of the gods, travel the sky, and appear wherever heaven celebrates. They are usually named together with the apsarases, the dancers of heaven, and in long lists of beings beside gods, yakshas, nagas, siddhas and kinnaras. In the Ramayana they stand for three things: music, enchanting beauty, and a power to bewilder the senses.

What Valmiki’s text says

Music: When the sage Bharadvaja welcomes Bharata’s army with a miraculous feast, he summons “the gods and gandharvas, Vishvavasu, Haha and Huhu” along with the apsarases (Ayodhya Kanda 2.91.16), and Narada, Tumburu and Gopa, “kings of the gandharvas”, sing before Bharata (2.91.45). At Rama’s wedding “gandharvas sang sweetly” while apsarases danced (Bala Kanda 1.73.37). The word for music itself grows from their name: Kusha and Lava, who first sing the Ramayana, are described as knowing the essence of gandharva, the art of music, and as looking “like gandharvas in human form” (1.4.10).

Beauty: “Like gods or gandharvas” is a stock phrase for people who are happy and lovely to see. Rama, Lakshmana and Sita live at Chitrakuta in this way (1.1.32-33). Gandharva women are among the mothers of the vanara heroes (1.17.5-6), and among the women Ravana has carried off to his palace (Sundara Kanda 5.22.45).

Power and weakness: Gandharvas are strong enough to be named in Ravana’s boon: he asked to be unkillable by gandharvas, yakshas, gods, danavas and rakshasas (1.15.13). Yet they too can fall. Viradha, the monstrous rakshasa who seizes Sita at the start of the Aranya Kanda, turns out to be “a gandharva named Tumburu”, cursed by Kubera (Vaishravana) to live in a rakshasa body because of his attachment to the apsaras Rambha (3.4.16-19).

Bewilderment and illusion: Among the divine weapons Vishvamitra gives Rama is “the beloved weapon of the gandharvas named Mohana”, the bewildering one (1.27.14). Rama later uses a Gandharva weapon against Khara’s army in Janasthana (3.25.37); in the great battle the rakshasas cannot even see Rama, “bewildered by the great soul’s supreme Gandharva weapon” (Yuddha Kanda 6.93.26), and he answers Ravana’s weapons “with the Gandharva the Gandharva” (6.102.19). A mirage is called a “city of the gandharvas”, and Lakshmana uses exactly this image for the golden deer: an illusion “like a city of the gandharvas” (3.43.7).

Where the word comes from

The gandharva is one of the oldest figures in Indian religion. In the Rigveda a gandharva (sometimes a single Gandharva, sometimes several) is linked with the waters, with the sacred drink soma, and with an apsaras as his partner. The Rigvedich wedding hymn names a gandharva, Vishvavasu, who has a claim on the young bride before her husband; the same name, Vishvavasu, appears among the gandharvas Bharadvaja summons in the Ramayana. The Atharvaveda treats gandharvas and apsarases as powerful, sometimes troubling beings who can disturb the mind, and gives charms against them.

Over time the gandharvas became above all the musicians of heaven. Later learned tradition calls music gandharva and counts gandharva-veda, the science of music, among the “secondary Vedas”. The Dharmashastras, such as the Manusmriti, also name a gandharva marriage, a union by mutual love without family arrangement. These later uses are not in Valmiki’s text, but they grow from the same picture of the gandharva as lover and singer.

Why it matters in the story

Gandharvas are rarely the heroes of a scene in the Ramayana, but they colour the whole poem. They are how Valmiki shows heaven rejoicing, how he praises human beauty, and how he names the power of illusion that runs through the story, from the golden deer to the weapons that blind an army. Readers often notice that the poem itself is presented as music: it is first sung by two boys who know the art of the gandharvas.