Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
A temple for a dog
Dogs are associated with Yama, who is the keeper of dharma. One of the meanings of dharma is the obligation of human beings to repay debts to ancestors, sages, gods, nature and society…
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Articles
Dogs of the gods
Published on 28th April, 2019, in Mid-day. In traditional Hindu society, dogs are considered inauspicious. This is most evident in dharma shastras, which were put together about 2,000 years ago. Dogs were associated with death, as well as with pollution and, therefore, belonged to the periphery of society. Dog-eater was a common way of describing…
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Articles
The metaphor of the forest
Published on 21st April, 2019, in Mid-day. To understand Hindu mythology, it is critical to understand the metaphor of forests. Forests represent the default wild world, where might is right, where strong prey on the weak; while culture represents the world, where the forest has been domesticated, where might is no longer right, and the…
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Articles
The pillars of gods and kings
Published on 31st March, 2019, in Mumbai Mirror. The Rig Veda refers to giant houses with many pillars. However, we have no archaeological evidence of them, because the material used was probably wood. In the Atharva Veda, we hear of the stambha, or pillar, that separates Heaven and Earth. Even today in traditional Hindu temples,…
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Articles
The sage who witnessed all
Published on 10th February, 2019, in Mid-day. In Hinduism, the Markandeya Purana is one of the oldest puranas, roughly 1,700 years old. It is special because it contains the earliest reference to the Devi Bhagavata story…
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Articles
Of hunger in heaven
We realise the three Swargas in Hindu mythology are designed very differently from the single heaven of Abrahamic mythology…
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Articles
The sacred form of Kashi
In Kashi, the river Ganga, which normally runs from the Himalayas to the sea in the south, takes a turn and moves northwards. This reverse flow of the Ganga is considered spiritually significant because it is believed that one can manifest certain tantric ideas in such places…
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Articles
Bypassing the womb
In Puranic literature, we come across the concept of ayonija, someone who is not born from the womb, and consequently, is able to bypass or rise above the cycle of birth and death…
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Articles
Ancient incest in the sky
In the Vedas, long before people knew about gods such as Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, there was a story of how the god of heaven committed incest with the goddess of dawn, his daughter…
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Articles
Men and women in Hindu mythology
God cannot exist without Goddess. Goddess cannot exist without God. Indian author Devdutt Pattanaik sheds light on Hindu mythology…
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Articles
Metaphors of the Goddess
It is a mystery for many why Hindus, for whom divinity is both male and female, treat women so badly…
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Articles
Who is a Hindu? Why do intellectuals scorn Hindu deities?
Hindus as it doesn’t comply with their preconceived notions of what god and religion should be…
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Articles
Who is a Hindu? North’s Kanwariya and South’s Kavadi
A selective understanding of the faith by those who control social discourse is the tragedy of Hinduism…
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Articles
Fever from Shiva’s rage
Those who see mythology as proto-history believe that as Vedic practices waned, and temple-based Agama traditions rose, followers of Vedas became closely associated with Vishnu worshippers…
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Articles
The forgotten Buffalo King
Not much is known about him, but the shrine is clearly not a Brahminical one and there is nothing about him found in Sanskrit literature…
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Articles
Who is a Hindu? Indra: Entitled, insecure, dispensable
How the primary god and great warrior of the Vedas ended up as a minor Puranic god…