Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Gita on Relationships
Krishna uses three powerful words in the Gita to understand relationships: adhyatma, adhidaivam, and adhiyajnam…
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Articles
Abandoned twins: Kripa and Kripi
One day, King Shantanu stumbles upon two abandoned babies on the forest floor: a boy and a girl. He adopts them, names them Kripa and Kripi, and raises them…
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Articles
Were There Brahmins In South India 2,000 Years Ago?
We normally assume that Brahmins have been present in every corner of India for the last 5,000 years. But this is not true. …
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Articles
When Brahmins Killed Kshatriyas and Kshatriyas Killed Brahmins
Anyone who reads the Ramayana and the Mahabharata carefully realises that both texts presuppose an event involving Parshuram, a Brahmin, who slaughters the Kshatriya kings. It is described as a terrible genocide, with five great lakes filled with blood. …
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Articles
Coil of Endless Serpents
Coiled serpents and inter-twined conjugal serpent pairs appear as sacred symbols on Hindu temple walls. They reflect sacred ideas from beyond the Vedic world, where communities venerated serpent groves, filled with termite mounds, which served as entrances to a subterranean world of magical beings — the Naga, serpents with hoods, multiple heads, and the magical…
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Articles
Who Did Draupadi Love?
The story of Draupadi fascinates many because she had five husbands. She did not choose to marry five men—she was instructed to do so. In mythology, no one demands explanations when men have multiple wives. …
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Articles
An Imagined Battle: The Violence of Ashoka and Yudhishthira
The oldest manuscripts of the Mahabharata are dated to a century after Ashokaʼs rule but the story refers to an earlier period, before Kali Yuga, which may be seen as code for a time before the rise of the Buddhist orders and the end of Brahmin patronage following the arrival of foreign kings like Yavanas,…
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Articles
Speaking of Shiva
In the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, Bhisma tells Arjuna the story of the fight between Shiva and Daksha. Shiva destroys the yagna of Daksha as he refuses to invite him to partake in a share of the sacrifice. This event happens at Ganga-dvara, which some people believe is Haridwar today…
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Articles
Secularising Ramayana and Mahabharata
When we study Buddhist and Jain lore, we realise many stories there are quite similar to stories found in Ramayana and Mahabharata…
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Articles
Gita is all about Family, Property and Inheritance
How do we decide who is an insider in a family, and who is an outsider? Who is mine, and who is not mine?…
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Articles
How the Kama Gita Evolved to Become the Kama-sutra
Everyone mentions Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita from the Mahabharata, but no one talks about Kama Gita also found in the Mahabharata…
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Articles
The Yugas Came Later
The four yugas of Hindu mythology (Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali) are based on the numbers on traditional four-sided dice: four, three, two, one. They refer to the four legs of the bull of dharma…
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Articles
No Dharma Without Dharma-sankat
Yagna is the primal ritual of the Veda. Mistranslated as sacrifice, it is a ritual of exchange and reciprocity. …
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Articles
From Vedic Soma to Puranic Amrut
Early scholars wondered what this Soma was, leading to rather colourful research. Was it a magical drink?…
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Articles
LGBTQIA+ Tales in Temples
For a long time, gatekeepers of Indian culture insisted that all things queer were Western. Then, people started reading the scriptures and realised, that was not quite the case…
