Yama
எமன் यम
Also Yamaraja, Dharmaraja, Kala, Antaka.
SmartaVillage and folk
Who this is
Yama is the judge of the dead, and the tradition is careful to call him Dharmaraja, the king of what is right, rather than a god of death as such. He was the first mortal to die and so the first to find the way, which is why he keeps the road. He does not decide arbitrarily: Chitragupta keeps the record and Yama reads it, and the whole conception is of an accounting rather than a mercy or a punishment. The south faces him, which is why no house is built facing south and a body is carried out that way.
How to recognise them
Dark green or black, on a buffalo, with a noose in one hand and a staff in the other, crowned, with a fierce face. Chitragupta stands beside him with a ledger and a pen. In the Tamil folk tellings he is a figure of some dread and in the puranic ones a scrupulous official, and the iconography keeps both.
Family and companions
Son of Surya and Samjna, twin of Yami, brother of Shani and of the Ashvins. Chitragupta is his record keeper. Markandeya and Nachiketa and Savitri are the three who faced him and are remembered for it.
How they are worshipped
Yama Deepam on Dhanteras; Bhai Dooj; the dark Chaturdashi before Diwali.
Not propitiated for favours. The Yama Deepam is lit at the threshold facing south on the Dhanteras evening, the one lamp of the year lit for him, to ask that no untimely death come to the house. Bhai Dooj is kept because his sister Yami fed him on that day. The ancestors’ rites are addressed past him rather than to him, and the south is the direction used for them.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
Savitri and the argument
Savitri chose Satyavan knowing he had a year to live, and when Yama came and took him she followed. He told her to turn back. She argued, and he granted her boons for the quality of the argument, each time excepting her husband’s life. At last she asked for sons by Satyavan, and he granted it before he saw what she had done, and had to give the man back to keep his own word. The story is told at the Vat Savitri vratam, and what is admired in it is not devotion but that she out argued the judge on his own ground.
Nachiketa at the door
A boy, given away to death by his father in a fit of temper, went and waited at Yama’s door three days without food because the master was out. Yama, returning, offered three boons for the discourtesy. The boy used the third to ask what happens after death, and Yama tried to buy him off with wealth and long life and would not answer. The boy refused every substitute. What Yama then told him is the Katha Upanishad, and the tradition notes that the teaching had to be extracted from death by refusing everything else first.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- The Yama Deepam at the threshold on Dhanteras and Bhai Dooj, when a sister marks her brother and he is given Yami’s protection.
- Tamil Nadu
- Emen in the folk tellings, and the Yama Deepam lit facing south on the Naraka Chaturdasi eve in many houses.
- Nepal
- Bhai Tika in the Tihar week is the most elaborate form of the brother and sister rite, with the seven coloured tika and the walnut.
- Maharashtra
- The Yamadeepdan is kept on Dhanteras, and the Dharmaraja reading of him is the one the kirtankars use.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own