Sumeru, The Aranyaka Quests, and Adaptations of Hindu Themes

 “Nara” is a word you hear a lot while doing the Aranyaka questline in Genshin Impact, referring to the traveler. While doing the Varuna Gatha chain, upon seeing some references to the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic, I started thinking about why they chose that word to refer to humans.

When I was a child, two names that would come up in succession during prayer were Nara and Narayana. I assumed they were both gods. After all, they looked like twins, and even had similar names. To my surprise, though, Nara and Narayana referred to the relationship between mortals and the divine. They were two sides of the same coin, and they were equally powerful and wise. In Hindu mythology, Gods and men cannot exist without one another.

The humans, or Nara, and Aranara in Genshin Impact have a symbiotic relationship as well. The Aranara are creations of Rukkhadevata, known by them as an Aranyani. There are two notable things shown by their naming conventions here. For one, the Aranara saw Rukkhadevata as one of them, in some ways. Secondly, Aranyani refers to an old, now mostly forgotten goddess of the forest in Hinduism. 

The Aranyaka questline is littered with callbacks to the Mahabharata, but perhaps more importantly, there are many references to the Rig Veda, a much more ancient text (by at least a millennium). Back then, around 1200 BCE, the primary Gods worshiped were elemental ones, such as Agni, the god of fire, and Varuna, the god of water and the sky. Some regions even had their own local Gods representing landmarks like rivers.

To people who have only seen how Hinduism is described in textbooks, the fact that those elemental gods were the dominant ones in worship may come as a surprise. Those textbooks use a trinity of Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. That is a relatively more modern development. The elemental gods, like Aranyani, represented the Earth more than the heavens. The humans’ devotion to them was more symbolic of the relationship they had with their surroundings. They nurtured the land around them and showed gratitude to the skies, hoping they would be blessed with good fortune and good harvests in return. In the years since, as South Asia has rapidly industrialized, the focus in everyday Hindu prayers has shifted from connection with nature to desire for wealth and knowledge.

This is what we see in Sumeru. With only a few exceptions, the adults can’t see the Aranara, who are the distillation of the inherent holiness of nature, the forest blessed by Rukkhadevata. In the years since her disappearance and Nahida’s imprisonment, the people are more focused on gaining knowledge at all costs, even as the forest that has given them so much withers away. The conclusions of those storylines spoke to a version of spirituality those in Sumeru may embrace as they move to a better future.

Embracing more modern notions of knowledge is not inherently mutually exclusive with having a deep connection and gratitude for the natural world around us. Nahida and the Aranara are proof of that, through their wisdom that is sometimes unconventional. As someone who was raised Hindu, the Aranyaka quests reinforced that engaging with the world around us and being grateful for it can not only help us, but can also help the world. Perhaps the relationship between Nara and Narayana is not just one between humans and gods, but one between ourselves and the world around us. 

And that even if the old stories are forgotten, like Aranyani’s, they still have meaning and purpose.