10.4 — India's Myths, as Stories and as Questions

Everything on the previous three pages is a reconstruction of something nobody practises. This is different: these stories are alive, told in households, performed annually, and believed by hundreds of millions of people.

Volume VII treats the material as religion and philosophy, at length. This page answers the questions people actually ask about it — who is who, why there are so many versions, and where the familiar images come from.

Getting oriented

Why are there so many gods, and are they separate?

Because the tradition is not organised the way the question assumes, and the honest answer includes several positions that have coexisted for millennia.

One common position — associated with the Upanishads and with Advaita Vedanta — is that there is a single reality, Brahman, and the many deities are forms through which it is approached. A verse from the Rigveda is quoted constantly in this connection: ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti, "truth is one, the wise speak of it in many ways".

Another position is straightforwardly devotional: a worshipper of Vishnu, or Shiva, or the Goddess, treats that deity as supreme and the others as subordinate. These are named traditions — Vaishnava, Shaiva, Shakta — and they have their own texts, philosophies and long histories of argument with each other.

A third is practical. Households have a family deity, a village has a local one, an occupation has a patron, and none of that requires resolving the theology.

The point worth taking away is that the tradition never required a single answer, and did not develop the machinery — councils, creeds, heresy trials — that would have produced one.

Who are the main figures?

The Trimurti: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer — with destruction understood as dissolution that permits renewal, not as evil. Brahma is almost never worshipped, with famously few temples dedicated to him, and several stories explain why.

Vishnu descends into the world when order collapses, as an avatar. The standard list of ten includes the fish, the tortoise, the boar, the man-lion, the dwarf, Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, sometimes the Buddha, and Kalki, who is still to come.

Shiva is the ascetic on the mountain, the lord of dance, and the household figure with Parvati and their sons. His symbol, the lingam, is usually explained in the tradition as a mark or sign of the formless, rather than the reading that nineteenth-century European writers imposed on it.

The Goddess — Devi, Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Parvati — is not a subordinate category. In the Shakta traditions she is the supreme reality and the male deities are inert without her.

Ganesha, elephant-headed, remover of obstacles, invoked at the start of any undertaking. Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana, worshipped for strength and devotion. Kartikeya, called Murugan in the south, where he is one of the most important deities of all.

Why does the same god have so many names?

Because a name is a description, and a deity accumulates them.

Vishnu has a thousand names — the Vishnu Sahasranama is a recited list of them — and so does Shiva, and so does the Goddess. Each is an epithet: destroyer of a particular demon, holder of a particular weapon, dweller in a particular place, possessor of a particular quality.

Regional names add another layer. Krishna is Jagannath in Odisha, Vithoba in Maharashtra, Guruvayurappan in Kerala, Ranganatha in Tamil Nadu, and the local form has its own stories, festivals and temple. Murugan, Skanda, Kartikeya and Subramanya are the same figure with very different regional weight.

The stories people ask about

Why does Ganesha have an elephant's head?

The commonest version: Parvati created a boy from the substance of her own body and set him to guard her door while she bathed. Shiva returned, did not know him, was refused entry, and beheaded him.

When Parvati's grief and rage became clear, Shiva sent his attendants to bring the head of the first living creature they found facing north, and it was an elephant.

Several other versions exist, including ones in which Shiva creates him, and ones in which the head is lost through a glance from Shani, the planet Saturn. The variation is normal, and asking which is correct is the wrong question for this material.

The story that Ganesha broke his own tusk to use as a pen when writing down the Mahabharata at Vyasa's dictation is the standard explanation for the broken tusk, and is a good example of a story that exists to explain an iconographic detail.

Why is Krishna blue?

Two explanations circulate and both are worth knowing.

The textual and symbolic one: dark blue or black is the colour of the infinite — the night sky, the deep ocean — and the name Krishna itself means dark. Depicting him blue rather than black marks him as beyond ordinary human colouring and associates him with the boundless.

The narrative one: in some accounts his colour comes from being poisoned as an infant by the demoness Putana, whose milk was venomous.

Rama is also depicted blue or green for the same symbolic reason, being an avatar of the same deity. The convention is a convention: it developed over centuries in painting and sculpture and is not described in the oldest texts.

What is the churning of the ocean?

One of the most-depicted stories, and a good example of gods and demons cooperating.

The gods, weakened, need the nectar of immortality — amrita — which lies at the bottom of the ocean of milk. They cannot churn it alone, so they make an alliance with the asuras. Mount Mandara is the churning stick, the serpent Vasuki is the rope, and Vishnu takes the form of a tortoise to support the mountain from beneath.

The first thing to emerge is poison, halahala, which threatens to destroy everything. Shiva drinks it and holds it in his throat, which turns blue — and Nilakantha, blue-throated, is one of his names.

Then treasures emerge in sequence: the wish-fulfilling cow, the goddess Lakshmi, the moon, the divine physician Dhanvantari carrying the pot of amrita, and others. The gods then trick the asuras out of their share, which is not presented as admirable and is part of a much larger pattern in which the two sides are not simply good and evil.

The story is depicted enormously — most spectacularly along an eighty-metre wall relief at Angkor Wat.

Why are there so many versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata?

Because they were performed and retold rather than fixed, and because each region made them its own.

Both epics grew over centuries. The Mahabharata explicitly contains layers — it describes itself as having been expanded from a shorter core — and the Ramayana's first and last books are generally regarded as later additions to Valmiki's text.

Regional retellings are not corruptions. Kamban's Tamil version, Tulsidas's Hindi Ramcharitmanas, Krittibas's Bengali, and the versions across Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos each make different choices — about Sita's agency, about Ravana's character, about the ending.

In several South East Asian versions Ravana is a more sympathetic figure, and in some Jain versions Rama does not kill him at all. Southern and tribal retellings have foregrounded Sita's perspective, and Shurpanakha's, for centuries.

The point A. K. Ramanujan made in his essay on the subject is that there is no original text of which these are variants; there is a story that exists in its tellings.

The structures behind the stories

What are the yugas?

Four ages that repeat in cycles, each shorter and more degraded than the last.

Satya Yuga, the age of truth, longest and best. Treta, in which the Ramayana is set. Dvapara, in which the Mahabharata is set. Kali Yuga, the present age, shortest and worst, in which dharma stands on one leg of four.

The numbers are enormous. The four together make a mahayuga of 4.32 million years, a thousand of which make one day of Brahma, and the cycle repeats. Then everything dissolves and begins again.

The structure is worth noticing regardless of belief. It is a cyclical model of time, in a world where most familiar religious frameworks are linear with a beginning and a single end. That difference has consequences for how history, progress and the individual life are conceived, and it is one of the substantive contrasts between Indian and Abrahamic thought.

Why are the demons not simply evil?

Because asuras are not devils, and the translation has caused persistent confusion.

Asuras and devas are both children of the same sage in the standard genealogies — half-brothers, in effect, contesting the same inheritance. Asuras frequently gain their power through extreme asceticism and devotion, which the gods are obliged to reward. Several are exemplary devotees. Prahlada, an asura, is one of the great figures of devotion in the tradition, and his own father is the demon whom Vishnu takes the man-lion form to kill.

Ravana is a scholar, a musician, a devotee of Shiva, and a ruler whose kingdom prospers. His fault is a specific transgression, not a nature. The same is true of most of the antagonists.

The framework is closer to law than to morality: the conflict is about adharma, actions that violate the order of things, rather than about a category of beings who are evil by constitution.

What are the vahanas, and are they decoration?

Every major deity has an animal mount — a vahana — and it carries meaning rather than being a detail.

Ganesha rides a mouse, which is either the smallest thing carrying the largest, or the mind's ability to get into any hole, depending on the commentary. Shiva's is Nandi the bull, and a Nandi statue faces the sanctum in every Shiva temple, positioned so that a worshipper looks past it towards the deity. Vishnu's is Garuda, an eagle. Durga's is a lion or tiger. Saraswati's is a swan, which in the tradition can separate milk from water, standing for discrimination between truth and falsehood. Yama, of death, rides a buffalo. Indra rides an elephant. Kartikeya rides a peacock.

The vahana is usually read as the quality the deity has mastered rather than a servant — the mouse as restless desire, the peacock as vanity, the bull as strength.

What comes next

The last page of this Part covers the rest of the world's mythologies, and the monsters that keep reappearing in all of them.