“Facts are everybody’s truth. Fiction is nobody’s truth. Myths are somebody’s truth”
Subjects
Period
Geography
Religions
Translations
Mythology
Year
Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
Articles, Books, TV Shows, Videos, Podcasts
Browse
-
Articles
How Was Atharva Veda Different?
The Rigveda praises the gods. The priest composes beautiful hymns, asks for cattle, sons, victory, rain. The relationship is simple: human below, god above, prayer going upward. The Atharva Veda works differently. The priest does not pray. He acts…
-
Articles
The Rise of Nava-grahas
In Vedic times, graha meant malevolent spirits who hurt mothers and babies. It had nothing to do with planets. The 3000-year-old Vedic Jyotisha had nothing to do with predicting the future. It was a practical science of timekeeping — fixing solstices, calibrating the lunar calendar, scheduling sacrifices. The Rig Veda mentions no grahas at all. It does, however, preserve a shadowy figure called Svarbhanu who causes a solar eclipse before the sage Atri drives him off…
-
Articles
Did Indra Eat Buffaloes?
We live in times, where people want to ban goat sacrifice during the Muslim observance of Bakra Eid, on grounds of compassion. This overt attack on Islamic rituals is also a covert attack on subaltern Hindu practices — where goddesses are offered fish and meat…
-
Articles
Southward Spread of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism
Traditionally, Arya-varta or the land of the Aryan people was triangulated by the Himalayas, the Ganga and the Yamuna. We know this from the early Dharma-shastra texts, composed around the time of Ashoka…
-
Articles
Did Greeks Influence Indian Theatre?
The history of theatre is often told through two great classical traditions: the theatre of ancient Greece and the theatre of ancient India. Both developed sophisticated ideas about storytelling, performance, music, and human emotions…
-
Articles
The Selective Sanctity of the Ganga
In Ayodhya Kanda, verse 52.89, Sita stands before the Ganga before crossing into exile and makes a vow. The Sanskrit is unambiguous. “Sura-ghata-sahasrena”: a thousand pots of wine. “Mamsa-bhuta-odanena”: cooked rice mixed with meat (the original Vedic biryani?). …
-
Articles
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…
-
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…
-
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. …
-
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, who is Baal in mythology? …
-
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…
-
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 described as Mauryan polish, hints at how the pillars of Maurya kings once looked — smooth, luminous, and authoritative…
-
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…
-
Articles
Historical Reality of Pre-colonial Learning in India
Dharampal’s book, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), is a groundbreaking historical work that used official British colonial archives to challenge the narrative that pre-colonial India was uneducated. …
-
Articles
How Southeast Asia Adapted Indian Ideas to Local Needs
Across Southeast Asia, from the Mekong Delta (in present-day Vietnam and Cambodia) to Java island of Indonesia, major archaeological sites reveal how Indian ideas travelled not through conquest but through trade, pilgrimage, and court patronage between 500 AD and 1500 AD. These sites show a layered interaction of Buddhism and Hinduism, reshaped by local ecology, politics, and economy…