Thousand Arms

In Premanand's celebrated seventeenth-century Gujarati narrative poem *Okhaharan*, the figure of the thousand-armed demon king Banasura stands at the very heart of the drama. His extraordinary multiplicity of arms is not merely a physical attribute but a symbol of overwhelming martial power and royal arrogance — the kind of pride that, in the devotional imagination of the *bhakti* tradition, inevitably invites divine correction. Banasura's thousand arms make him nearly invincible among mortals and even among lesser gods, and Premanand renders this fearsome quality with vivid descriptive energy drawn from the Puranic sources he adapts.

The confrontation between this many-armed warrior and Lord Krishna becomes the poem's defining conflict. When Krishna engages Banasura in battle to rescue Aniruddha, the clash of divine grace against brute force is made visually spectacular through the repeated emphasis on those thousand arms — arms that hurl weapons, block attacks, and ultimately fall before Krishna's Sudarshana Chakra. Premanand uses this motif to underscore a central *bhakti* teaching: no quantity of worldly strength can withstand the will of the Supreme.