Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
The Lore of Weavers
Published on 18th December, 2022, in Mid-day. Weaving is a very unique human activity. Animals don’t wear clothes, humans wear clothes. The earliest clothes that humans wore were skins of animals. Gradually, it was the bark of plants, and leaves. Later, fibres of plants were gently woven. Eventually, humans discovered the fine art of weaving,…
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Articles
The Boar of Kantara Has Much Significance In Our Mythology
Published on 2nd December, 2022, in The Hindu. The domesticated pig descended from the wild boar. The wild boar is a forager, the domesticated pig is a scavenger. Symbolically, they are a reminder of wild nature and cultivated culture. The pig was amongst the earliest animals to be domesticated across the world, and was a…
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Articles
Why East India’s Contribution to Hinduism Remains Forgotten
Published on 24th September, 2022, in Times of India. Whenever we talk about Hinduism of India, most of the attention is taken over by talk of North India, with Rajput lands to its west and Gangetic plains to its east. Attention then shifts to South India, followed by talk of the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Hardly any…
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Articles
Tales of the Horned Sage
Published on 18th September, 2022, in Mid-day. The story of Rishyasringa Muni is found in the Ramayana. Dashratha had three wives, but no children. So, he called a sage to perform the ritual that would get him children. The rishi selected was Rishyasringa Muni. In Odia miniature paintings, Rishyasringa is depicted as having two horns.…
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Articles
The Shaven Head of Adi Shankara
Published on 16th September, 2022, in The Hindu. Vedic Rishis are imagined with long hair, tied in a topknot. But Adi Shankara, the Vedanta philosopher, is depicted in popular artworks with a shaved head, covered with a drape. An enquiry into how the Hindu sage and monk treated his hair reveals how it has been…
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Articles
Guardian Yakshis of Jainism
Published on 31st July, 2022, in Mid-day. Jainism is a monastic order. Historically, it emerged 2,500 years ago, with most scriptures written 1,500 years ago. However, as per mythology, Jainism is an eternal religion (sanatan dharma), with 24 Tirthankaras appearing on earth in each of the infinite cycles of time, along with 12 Chakravarthys and…
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Articles
Did Aryans Migrate Out of India to the West, or to the South?
Published on 16th July, 2022, in Times of India. Three kinds of people love the word Arya even today. The first is the local Hindutva folks who insist ‘Arya’ refers to the best of Hindu civilization. The second is the White Supremacist of the Western world; they prefer the word ‘Aryan’ to Arya, and insist…
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Articles
Flying Mountains Do Not Lie
Published on 29th May, 2022, in Mid-day. Nationalists want to believe that Hinduism existed homogeneously across the Indian subcontinent (Akhand Bharat) since time immemorial. However, everyone who studies history knows this is not true. Harappan civilisation thrived 4,000 years ago only in Northwest India. Vedic civilisation emerged 3,000 years ago only in Gangetic plains after…
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Articles
Kashmir Before Islam
Published on 21st May, 2022, in Times of India. The Muslims say that Suleiman (Solomon) came to Kashmir on a flying throne (takht), sat on a hill in Srinagar, and got his djinns to clear the lake, get rid of barbarians and create a land of the true faith. But Islam actually emerged in Arabia…
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Articles
Why Scholars Don’t Agree About the Origins of the Shivlinga
Published on 18th May, 2022, in Times of India. Orientalist academicians love describing the Shiva-ling as a ‘phallic symbol’ because it irritates the Hindu who prefer to see the object of their devotion as something spiritual, not sexual. For the Orientalist, i.e. Western and Westernised scholar, such descriptions are, at one level, a way of…
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Articles
The Jogi As Seasonal Hermit
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in The Hindu. In North India, especially in the Gangetic plains, in what is now Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, we find songs known as Baramasa. It is a 12-month cycle in poetry, expressing the loneliness and longing of a woman in a village, for a husband who is travelling…
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Articles
Tigress Goddess of Harappa
Published on 27th February, 2022, in Mid-day. The first goddess of India is depicted on Harappan seals dated to 2,500 BCE. She is shown as half tiger, like a sphinx, upper half female with headdress and bangles, and the lower half of the cat. It’s the oldest sphinx image in the world, showing a woman…
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Articles
‘Are We Seeking Cultural Unity By Denying History?’
Published on 12th February, 2022, in Times of India. Tall statues of men, using Indian money and Chinese technology, are being built across India to unite India. There is the Statue of Unity of Sardar Patel in Gujarat, the Statue of Equality of Ramanuja-acharya built near Hyderabad, and soon there will be the Statue of…
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Articles
Mythology of Maternal Uncles
Published on 30th January, 2022, in Mid-day. The maternal uncle plays a very important role in Hindu scriptures. He is called the ‘Maama’. He is the brother who visits his sister’s house during the rakhi festival. She visits his house during Bhai Dooj, the final day of Diwali. He watches over her welfare. It is…
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Articles
Tying the Knot
Published on 22nd August, 2021, in Mid-day. In Hindu metaphysics, yoga is the practice of untying mental knots. Bhoga is the experience of life that creates these mental knots. When we consume life, we experience hunger, fear, delight, jealousy, attachment, rage, greed, frustration, hatred, joy, and these various emotions and stimulations cause our mind to…
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Articles
Bhairava’s Truth In the Light Of the Funeral Pyre
Published on 17th May, 2021, in Scroll.in . Hindutva is a 19th-century political ideology that proclaims itself to be the defender of Hinduism. Yet it is terrified of truth. The truth of death – of hundreds of bodies floating down the Ganga and thousands being cremated in funeral pyres across India, which reveals not the…