How the Bhagavad Gita Invented Sattvic Food
The Vedas gave us Purusha. Tantra and Yoga gave us Prakriti and the gunas. Only the Bhagavad Gita welded these to food and caste, creating the “sattvic” framework popularly invoked today…
Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Did Proto-Naxals fight the East India Company?
Today, the word Naxal is used casually by politicians and businessmen to demonise anyone protesting against exploitation as anti-national. This does not bode well for a country where a large proportion of the youth are unemployed and risk a bleak future with the rise of AI…
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Articles
The Chandala in the Vedas
The term Chandala, referring to the “lowest of the low” in Brahmin lore, appears a few times in the Vedic literature itself. It is essentially absent from the Rigveda Samhita and emerges only in the later strata of the corpus — the later Samhitas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. …
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Articles
Who Is Baal?
The name Baal has been appearing a lot lately, especially in Western media, in the context of war between Iran and Israel. Known as a false god in the Bible, his images are being burnt in public. Western capitalists are being accused of worshipping him secretly as part of a demon cult. Conspiracy theories aside,…
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Articles
The Convenient Politics of “Later Additions” in the Ramayana
When Sita is banished to the forest while pregnant, on the basis of nothing more than public gossip, modern readers recoil. Many quickly reach for a comforting explanation: this episode, they say, is a ‘later addition’, an interpolation, not really part of the original Ramayana…
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Articles
Secrets of Bihar’s Mirrored Caves
One of the most striking experiences near Rajgir in Bihar lies inside the Barabar Caves. The walls are polished to such perfection that they are like mirrors. These surfaces were carved and finished over 2,300 years ago, yet they still reflect light with startling clarity, as if time has barely touched them. This sheen, often…
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Articles
How Vagdevi Merged Into Saraswati
The goddess we call Saraswati today begins as Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech, identified primarily with the Vedic deity Vac. Her earliest stories foreground the immense power, and sometimes the deceptive nature, of the spoken word. These are found in ritual Vedic texts known as the Brahmanas…
New Books
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Flower of India: Ways of Seeing the Lotus
In Flower of India, bestselling author and renowned mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik examines the lotus as one of the most pervasive and resonant symbols of the Indian subcontinent. Through its many avatars—as plant, resource, metaphor, design, and sacred form—he traces how the lotus has shaped India’s cultural imagination across history, religion, art, and everyday life. Concise…
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Astra Shastra: Weapons of the Hindu Gods
Well-known mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik introduces young readers to the wonderful weapons of Hindu gods with his unique art and easy-to-read text…
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Escape the Bakasura Trap : Let Contentment Fuel Your Growth
This book re-discovers this path, first revealed by Hanuman in the Mahabharata. Insightful and inspiring, Escape the Bakasura Trap is another classic from one of our great mythologists and thinkers…
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लंकेश: रावण संग एक रोमांचक यात्रा
यह पुस्तक भारत के सबसे विख्यात महाकाव्य रामायण और इस कारण भारत के सबसे बड़े खलनायक, रावण, को विस्तार से जानने की राह खोलती है।…
Devdutt Pattanaik writes and speaks on the relevance of mythology in modern times, especially in areas of management, governance, and leadership.