Kartikeya

Kartikeya, known also as Skanda, Murugan and Subrahmanya, is the god of war and the commander of the army of the gods, the second son of Shiva and Parvati, who rides a peacock and carries the spear called the vel. His birth is bound to a purpose: the gods, oppressed by the demon Taraka, whom no one but a son of Shiva could kill, needed such a son, and the elaborate myths of Kartikeya's conception turn on how that son was brought forth. In one widespread account the divine seed is carried by Agni the fire and the Ganga, and the child is fostered by the six Krittikas, the mother-stars of the Pleiades, from whom he takes the name Kartikeya and, in some tellings, six faces, one to take the milk of each.

Grown with miraculous speed, he leads the heavenly host and destroys Taraka. There is a notable regional dimension to his worship: in the Tamil-speaking south of India and among Tamil communities across the world he is Murugan, one of the most beloved of all gods, a youthful lord of the hills honoured at great temples such as Palani and Tiruchendur and in the exuberant vow-taking of the festival of Thaipusam. In the north his worship is comparatively muted, and he is often shown as a celibate youth, whereas in the Tamil tradition he has two consorts. Kartikeya thus wears a strikingly different face in different parts of the Hindu world.

Kartikeya's Tamil form Murugan has one of the most visible living festival traditions of any deity discussed in this atlas, and its largest modern expression takes place not in India but in Malaysia, at the limestone hill complex known as Batu Caves on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where a Murugan temple set inside a natural cave system has become the site of one of the largest Thaipusam gatherings anywhere in the world, drawing enormous crowds of Tamil Hindu devotees from across Malaysia and neighbouring countries each year. A colossal golden statue of Murugan, among the tallest statues of a Hindu deity anywhere, stands at the base of the 272 steps leading up to the cave temple, itself a modern addition completed in the early twenty first century that has become one of the most recognizable images associated with the festival internationally.

During Thaipusam, devotees fulfilling vows carry kavadi, ornate structures often attached to the body by hooks or skewers piercing the skin, a physically demanding act of devotion undertaken to fulfill a vow or express gratitude, and the procession to Batu Caves draws not only worshippers but large numbers of spectators and, increasingly, international visitors and media attention. Malaysia's substantial Tamil Hindu population, descended largely from indentured labourers brought to British Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has maintained and grown Murugan devotion into one of the most publicly visible living Hindu festival traditions outside South Asia, an example of how a specific South Indian deity's cult became, through the channel of colonial-era labour migration, a major festival tradition in Southeast Asia in its own right.