Vishvakarma

Vishvakarma, the name means the maker of all or all-accomplishing, is the divine architect and craftsman of the gods, the celestial engineer, carpenter, smith and artist who builds and forges the wonders of the heavens. It is Vishvakarma who constructs the palaces and the flying chariots of the gods, who forges Indra's thunderbolt (in one account from the bones of a sacrificing sage), and who is credited with building the great cities of myth, golden Lanka before it fell to the demon-king Ravana, Krishna's city of Dwarka, and Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. His origins reach back to the Rigveda, where the name Vishvakarman belongs to an abstract creator-figure, the all-maker who fashions the whole world as a kind of cosmic craftsman, a philosophical image of the divine artificer that later crystallised into the personal god of craft and building.

In this developed form Vishvakarma is the patron deity of the working craftsmen of India, the architects, carpenters, metalworkers, sculptors, weavers and artisans, who honour him as the divine source and exemplar of their skills. He is worshipped especially at the festival of Vishvakarma Puja, widely observed in workshops, factories and among craft communities, when tools and machines are cleaned, decorated and set before his image in thanks for the skill of the hands that use them. Vishvakarma is thus both a grand cosmic builder of the gods' abodes and the intimate patron of every workshop.

A story preserved in the Puranas gives Vishvakarma's craftsmanship a family motive rather than a cosmic one. His daughter Sanjna, married to the sun god Surya, found her husband's radiance unbearable and left a shadow double, Chhaya, in her place while she withdrew to the wilderness disguised as a mare. When Surya eventually tracked her down, her father is said to have mounted the sun on his lathe and pared away an eighth of its brilliance, so that Surya became bearable to look upon and to live beside.

Several Puranic tellings add that the shavings ground from the sun's disc did not go to waste: Vishvakarma forged them into the weapons carried by the greatest gods, Vishnu's discus, Shiva's trident, Kartikeya's spear and Kubera's mace among them, so that the sharpest instruments of heaven are described as literally cut from surplus sunlight. The story recasts Vishvakarma's usual identity as builder of palaces and cities into something more domestic, an act performed to save a daughter's marriage, and gives a mythic origin both to eclipse traditions, since the sun is diminished from its original brilliance, and to the association of grinding, fire and metalwork with a god who is, before any temple or chariot, the craftsman who first made the sun fit to be looked at.