Apsara (celestial dancer)

An apsara is a celestial dancer from Hindu tradition; hundreds of apsaras and devatas appear on the walls of Khmer temples.

Dancing apsaras, a Bayon-period sandstone relief, late 12th to early 13th century.

Deity details
Khmer name	អប្សរា
Also known as	Apsaras; Celestial dancer
Religion	Hinduism
Figure type	Spirit
Sites	Angkor Wat, Banteay Srei, Ta Prohm, Preah Khan (Angkor), Bayon
Subjects	Religion & Spiritual Life; Visual Arts & Design; Dance & Theatre

An apsara (អប្សរា) is a celestial dancer from Hindu tradition. Hundreds of apsaras and devatas appear on the walls of Khmer temples. In the story of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, the apsaras rose from the ocean as gods and demons churned it for the drink of immortality. Apsaras and the standing female figures called devatas (ទេវតា) both come from Hindu traditions of India; the Khmer borrowed aspects of these traditions and adapted them to Cambodian culture. The carved costumes and headdresses of both inspired the costumes of the classical dance that the Historical Society of Long Beach names Robam Tep Apsara.

Name

Apsara is a Sanskrit word for a celestial dancer. The Sanskrit singular is apsarás and the plural apsarasas; in English the forms apsara and apsaras are more common. The guide to the Angkor monuments by the conservator Maurice Glaize glosses apsaras as celestial dancers, and the devata, also written tevoda, as a feminine divinity.

Origin

Several texts from classical India tell how the apsaras came to be. In the version summarized by Patrick Kersalé's Sounds of Angkor, gods and demons were all mortal at first. They joined forces, on Vishnu's advice, to draw amrita, the nectar of immortality, out of the ocean of milk. The work took a thousand years, and then the churning brought forth many marvels, the apsaras among them. Glaize wrote that these flying nymphs animate the sky of the god Indra with their dancing. An exhibition text of the National Museum of Cambodia places the apsaras in the Mahabharata, born from the churning.

In the telling of the Sovanna Phum Art Association, the apsaras were born from the foam that flew up as the ocean was churned for Toek Amridh, the liquor of immortality. They danced for the gods rather than for people, and took form on earth to encourage rain, good harvests, prosperity and the protection of the kingdom.

Texts differ on their number. Classical Indian sources give a limited number, from seven to twenty-six, each with her own name and role, but with many variations; some writings speak of thousands. An Old Khmer inscription, K. 327, records temple maids who bore the names of apsaras: Tilottamā, Urvaśi, Manovatī, Menukā, Rambhā and Sānamatī.

An apsara also appears in an origin story of the Khmer. Glaize recorded a popular but less widespread tradition that traces the Khmer to the union of the sage Kambu and the apsara Mera. The tradition lives on above all in the name Kambuja, "son of Kambu", the root of the word "Cambodian".

Apsaras and devatas in stone

Glaize set the flying apsaras apart from the devatas of the reliefs, who stand still, richly adorned, holding flowers. In the account of the Historical Society of Long Beach, apsaras are shown dancing and share one dress and pose, while each devata stands as an individual, with a facial expression and dress of her own. Both kinds wear elaborate headdresses carved in sandstone.

In Glaize's account, the apsaras keep a single pose taken from a flying figure, and only the gestures of the arms vary a little from one to the next. They are usually small. At Preah Khan they stand in lines, and on the pillars of the Bayon in groups of two or three. These thousands of figures wear jewels, glittering headdresses and a light cloth that clings to the thighs, its ends flying out behind. Some stand on a lotus and others fly. Glaize saw in them a divine image of joy.

Sounds of Angkor sets out the canon of the apsaras on the churning relief at Angkor Wat: one leg bent, the other lifted behind, the bust arched back and both arms raised with garlands of jasmine. They always appear in the sky, above the king when he is shown, and above the gods or level with them. In this scene most apsaras are female, but some are male. The top of their sampot flares like the petals of a flower. On many medallions on the door jambs of Angkor Wat, apsaras are carved without legs and can be known by this flared top.

Devatas, in Glaize's account, decorate the stepped walls of the sanctuary and, in the 12th century, the walls of halls and galleries. They are carved at no less than half scale and wear jewelry. Their long dresses and their many kinds of hair styles and tiaras (mukuta) change with the period. Glaize himself also called the devatas celestial nymphs.

Glaize recorded a low frieze of apsaras on the plain wall that screens the western entrance galleries from the temple, and another under the cornice of the cross-shaped cloister. Sounds of Angkor sets apart another group, the "sacred dancers", who danced for the Hindu gods as an offering. They were called nāṭikāḥ in Sanskrit and rmāṃ in 10th-century Old Khmer. A long frieze of them runs along the fourth gallery, and others appear in the cross-shaped cloister and the central tower.

At Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat (អង្គរវត្ត), King Suryavarman II's temple-mausoleum, was built from about 1113 to 1150. Its great relief of the churning lies in the south wing of the east side of the third gallery. A frieze of countless apsaras runs the length of the panel. In a note to his 2010 article, Martin Knust wrote that apsara reliefs cover a very large area elsewhere in the temple, but that none appears on the large reliefs of the southern gallery.

Figures of devatas fill the temple; Glaize wrote that it holds hundreds of them. Hans Leisen and Esther von Plehwe-Leisen, who run the German Apsara Conservation Project, record over 1,850 female divinities on its walls. On the east face of the western entrance galleries, devatas stand alone or in groups of two or three; Glaize singled these out for their quality. In the gallery of the second enclosure, he noted the wide range of their hair styles and dress.

Weather damages the sandstone of Angkor in particular through scale formation: the relief forms a hard surface that slowly comes away from the stone beneath, taking the carving with it. Scientists and students linked to the German project began research on the Angkor temples in 1995, and the training of Cambodian conservators started two years later. The project has run since 1997 and works with the APSARA National Authority.

Other temples

• At Banteay Srei, dated to 967, small devatas stand under arches at the corners of the towers on the north and south. They have bare torsos and plaited hair, wear rich ornaments and play with flowers. A pediment from a gateway of the third enclosure, sent to the Musée Guimet in Paris, shows a scene from the Mahabharata. In the description by George Coedès that Glaize quoted, the gods created the apsara Tilottama to turn the asura brothers Sunda and Upasunda against each other. The relief shows the brothers each seizing her by one hand.
• At Ta Prohm, founded under Jayavarman VII, the temple's stele records 615 dancers living inside its enclosure. A pavilion on the east axis is known as the Hall of Dancers. Neth Simon, an archaeologist with the APSARA National Authority, has said that it takes the name from its many lintels carved with rows of dancing apsaras, and that early French researchers gave it the name as a working label. Apsaras also dance on its pillars. The hall was in serious disrepair when the Archaeological Survey of India started work on it in 2004, and the restoration took nearly 20 years. Across Angkor, a great many Buddha images were erased, reworked or recut as Hindu symbols, while apsaras and other Hindu motifs were mostly left alone. Glaize described a building at Ta Prohm, of unusual design and outside the sacred enclosure, as perhaps related to the "Royal Palace" named in a stanza of the temple's inscription, unless it was kept for ritual dance, since apsaras form friezes above its openings.
• At Preah Khan, Glaize wrote that several fine apsara friezes above the openings in the cross-shaped court of the third enclosure confirm that the area was probably a hall for ritual dance. In a note to his article, Knust quoted Les Khmers by Dagens for a figure of 1,000 dancers assigned to Preah Khan in the 12th century.

In dance

The Sovanna Phum Art Association ties the dance it calls Robam Apsara to the apsaras of the churning. In its account, the dance was performed at offerings and at celebrations in the palace during the Angkorian era, and today it stands for the country's peace and freedom.

The exhibition text of the National Museum of Cambodia places "The Apsara Dance" in the 20th century, among the dances of the period of King Norodom Sihanouk. It writes that Queen Sisowath Kossamak created the Ballet of Apsaras in the mid-1960s, with costumes copied from the Angkor reliefs, and that Princess Buppha Devi had, in the decade before the 2019 exhibition, given it new headdresses and costumes. In Charya Burt's telling, the Apsara Dance, based on the carvings of Angkor Wat, shows Mera in white, the color of purity, dancing in a garden among her attendants. In a note, Knust wrote that 12th-century depictions of these Hindu mythological figures show postures and gestures very close to those of contemporary apsara dance, citing Dance in Cambodia by Toni Samantha Phim and Ashley Thompson.

Prince Tesso Sisowath, director of Princess Buppha Devi's dance school, has said that the name apsara belongs only to a dance that Queen Kossamak created for the princess, inspired by the reliefs of Angkor Wat. In his view, not every dancer of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia can be called an apsara dancer; to put it simply, a dancer playing Sita in the Reamker cannot.

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