By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The Rig Veda 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. The Rig Vedic world is fundamentally…

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist In Vedic times, graha meant malevolent spirits who hurt mothers and babies. It had nothing to do with planets. The 3,000-year-old Vedic Jyotisha had nothing to do with predicting the future. It was a practical science of time-keeping — fixing solstices, calibrating the lunar calendar, scheduling sacrifices….

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist 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…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Originally Brahmins were simply transmitters of the Veda. Later, as keepers of dharma-shastra, they offered administrative services to kings. From the 10th century AD, they faced enormous competition from a rival caste group offering scribal, accounting and advisory services — the Kayasthas. Brahmins had a ritually…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist If you only consume today’s festival talk, you would think India’s calendar is a relay race between Ram and Krishna. That is a late narrowing. The older seasonal spine is goddess-centred and nature-driven. It was about paying attention to the weather, to the vegetation, to the…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Kambaramayanam is one of the most celebrated works of Tamil literature. Composed by the poet Kamban around the ninth century in Tamil Nadu, in the time of Chola kings, it is a lyrical retelling of the Ramayana filled with rich poetry, elaborate metaphors and deep moral…

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist 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….

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Over 2,200 years ago, two rulers on opposite ends of Asia confronted a similar problem: how to hold together vast, diverse territories emerging from long periods of conflict. Qin Shi Huang in China and Ashoka in India both inherited States forged through conquest. Yet the solutions…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist  In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity. The early Upanishads were composed between 600 BC and 200 BC, while the early Dharma-shastra were composed between 200 BC and 500 AD. The former is more spiritual. The latter is more legal.  Strict…