Who they are

Uma Haimavati appears in a single scene of a single Upanishad, and the Kena gives her almost nothing a biographer could use. It gives her a name, and it says she was radiant, shining with great beauty. It does not say where she came from, whose daughter she is, or where she goes afterwards. She stands in the open sky at the exact point where a god's search has failed, and she speaks one decisive sentence. That is the whole of her in the text, and it is enough to make her one of the most striking teachers the Upanishads record.

What she teaches is shaped by whom she teaches. Her pupil is Indra, the king of the gods, who has just watched the thing he was chasing vanish in front of him. Agni and Vayu, fire and wind, have already come back defeated. The order of heaven has run out of answers, and the answer comes from someone the text gives no rank in that order at all. She tells Indra that the presence was Brahman, and that the victory the gods had been celebrating as their own was Brahman's. The teaching corrects pride, and it comes from outside the circle that was proud.

Her name is the first thing later readers reached for. Haimavati can be read as "daughter of Himavat", the mountain king, and later tradition took her to be Parvati, the consort of Shiva. Later commentators also read her in a second way: as knowledge itself, divine wisdom taking a form so that a god could be taught. The word can also be taken as "adorned with gold", which fits the Kena's picture of her shining. A reader may hold all of these, but should know that they are later readings. The Upanishad itself names her, describes her, lets her speak, and stops there.

Set beside the other women of the early Upanishads, she has a place of her own. In the Brihadaranyaka, Gargi Vachaknavi questions Yajnavalkya before an assembly of scholars, and Maitreyi asks her husband for the knowledge that makes one immortal. Both are honoured for what they ask. Uma Haimavati is honoured for what she tells. With Gargi and Maitreyi she is among the earliest women the Upanishads name in the presence of the teaching of Brahman, and of the three she is the one who stands as its teacher, with the king of the gods for her pupil.

There is a quiet logic in where the Kena places her. The whole Upanishad turns on a paradox: Brahman is that by which the mind thinks and the eye sees, and so it cannot be held as an object by mind or eye. When Indra runs towards the presence, it is gone; it cannot be caught by the one who chases it. What reaches him instead is a teacher. The text seems to say that what cannot be seized can still be told, by one who knows, to one who has come as near as he is able. Uma Haimavati is that telling, given a name and a radiant form.

Key dialogues

• The Spirit Before the Gods

Questions to explore

• Why does the Kena give the decisive word to a figure it describes only by her name and her radiance?
• What does Uma Haimavati's answer correct in the gods' pride over their victory?