Rati

Rati is desire as a goddess, the wife of Kamadeva, the god of love, and the pleasure that answers to his longing; her name is the ordinary Sanskrit word for erotic delight. Her role turns the central Kama myth on its hinge: when the gods send Kama to break Shiva's meditation and Shiva opens his third eye and burns him to ash, it is Rati's grief, her mourning and her plea, that wins the concession by which Kama is allowed to live on, though bodiless, which is why desire is everywhere and yet cannot be seen.

In the Puranic sequel both are reborn: Kama as Pradyumna, the son of Krishna, and Rati as Mayavati, who raises the child (not knowing who he is) and later becomes his wife. She is a daughter of Daksha in most accounts. She is rarely worshipped alone, appearing beside Kama at the spring festivals, but she carries a claim the tradition does not disown: that desire has a consort and is not, in itself, a thing to be ashamed of.

The burning of Kama and Rati's grief are re-enacted, rather than merely retold, in a living festival still kept in parts of South India on the eve of Holi. Known regionally as Kama Dahanam, the burning of Kama, the observance involves the ritual burning of an effigy representing Kamadeva, paralleling the mythic incineration by Shiva's opened third eye, and in some regional forms of the accompanying storytelling and performance, particularly in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Rati's mourning and her successful plea for her husband's continued, bodiless existence are recited or dramatized as the reason the fire is lit at all, the community's bonfire standing in for the fire from Shiva's eye and the occasion serving simultaneously as the mythic origin of Holi's own bonfire, Holika Dahan, in some local traditions, and as a distinct commemoration of desire's near destruction and survival.

Beyond ritual, the pairing of Kama and Rati supplied one of the most productive subjects in classical and medieval Indian sculpture and painting, appearing in temple friezes and courtly miniatures as an idealized loving couple whose intertwined figures modelled erotic sentiment, shringara rasa, as a legitimate aesthetic and devotional category in its own right rather than something requiring embarrassment, a claim about desire's dignity carried in stone and paint as much as in the myth Rati's grief resolves.