page_title: Themes in Avatar
section_title: Parallels with Hinduism
hierarchical_section_title: Themes in Avatar / Religion and spirituality / Parallels with Hinduism
caption_attribution_description: English: Krishna raising Mount Govardhan, an illustration from the Bhagavata Purana manuscript,ca 1640. (Cropped version from an image with partially fragmented borders) Opaque watercolour on paper. Bundi, Rajasthan. India.
context_page_description: The 2009 American science fiction film Avatar has earned widespread success, becoming the second highest-grossing film in history. The blockbuster has provoked vigorous discussion of a wide variety of cultural, social, political, and religious themes identified by critics and commentators, and the film's writer and director James Cameron has responded that he hoped to create an emotional reaction and to provoke public conversation about these topics. The broad range of Avatar's intentional or perceived themes has prompted some reviewers to call it "an all-purpose allegory" and "the season's ideological Rorschach blot". One reporter even suggested that the politically charged punditry has been "misplaced": reviewers should have seized on the opportunity to take "a break from their usual fodder of public policy and foreign relations" rather than making an ideological battlefield of this "popcorn epic".
  Discussion has centered on such themes as the conflict between modern human and nature, and the film's treatment of imperialism, racism, militarism and patriotism, corporate greed, property rights, spirituality and religion.
context_section_description: The Times of India suggested Avatar was a treatise on Indianism "for Indophiles and Indian philosophy enthusiasts", starting from the very word Avatar itself.  A Houston Chronicle piece critiqued the film in terms of the ancient Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, commenting on the Na'vi visual similarity with Rama and Krishna—avatars central to the respective epics and traditionally depicted with blue skin, black hair, and a tilak mark on the forehead.  Another critic found that elements of the film's plot resembled such teachings and concepts of Hinduism as reincarnation of the soul, ecological consciousness, and incarnations of deities on Earth, commending Avatar and its director for "raising the global stature of Hinduism ... in months", while criticizing them for substantiating the western reluctance to accept anything oriental in its pristine form.
  Cameron calls the connection a "subconscious" reference: "I have just loved ... the mythology, the entire Hindu pantheon, seems so rich and vivid." He continued, "I didn't want to reference the Hindu religion so closely, but the subconscious association was interesting, and I hope I haven't offended anyone in doing so." He has stated that he was familiar with a lot of beliefs of the Hindu religion and found it "quite fascinating".
  Answering a question from Time magazine in 2007, "What is an Avatar anyway?" James Cameron replied, "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body."  In 2010, Cameron confirmed the meaning of the title to the Times of India: "Of course, that was the significance in the film, although the characters are not divine beings.  But the idea was that they take flesh in another body."
  Following the film's release, reviewers focused on Cameron's choice of the religious Sanskrit term for the film's title. A reviewer in the Irish Times traced the term to the ten incarnations of Vishnu.  Another writer for The Hindu concluded that by using the "loaded Sanskrit word" Cameron indicated the possibility that an encounter with an emotionally superior—but technologically inferior—form of alien may in the future become a next step in human evolution—provided we will learn to integrate and change, rather than conquer and destroy.
  Maxim Osipov of ISKCON argued in The Sydney Morning Herald that "Avatar" is a "downright misnomer" for the film because "the movie reverses the very concept [that] the term 'avatar'—literally, in Sanskrit, 'descent'—is based on.  So much for a descending 'avatar', Jake becomes a refugee among the aborigines."  Vern Barnet in Charlotte Observer likewise thought that the title insults traditional Hindu usage of the term since it is a human, not a god, who descends in the film.  However, Rishi Bhutada, Houston coordinator of the Hindu American Foundation, stated that while there are certain sacred terms that would offend Hindus if used improperly, 'avatar' is not one of them.  Texas-based filmmaker Ashok Rao added that 'avatar' does not always mean a representative of God on Earth, but simply one being in another form—especially in literature, moviemaking, poetry and other forms of art.
  Explaining the choice of the color blue for the Na'vi, Cameron said "I just like blue.  It's a good color ... plus, there's a connection to the Hindu deities, which I like conceptually." Commentators agreed that the blue skin of the Na'vi, described in a New Yorker article as "Vishnu-blue",  "instantly and metaphorically" relates the film's protagonist to such avatars of Vishnu as Rama and Krishna. An article in the San Francisco Examiner described an 18th-century Indian painting of Vishnu and his consort Laksmi riding the great mythical bird Garuda as "Avatar prequel" due to its resemblance with the film's scene in which the hero's blue-skinned avatar flies a gigantic raptor.  Asra Q. Nomani of The Daily Beast likened the hero and his Na'vi mate Neytiri to images of Shiva 
caption: The hovering Govardhan mountain protects Krishna's tribe from an air attack, as in Avatar.
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