By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist If one travels around Pune, one occasionally comes across small folk shrines dedicated to a deity known as Mhasoba, or the Buffalo-God. Not much is known about him, but the shrine is clearly not a Brahminical one and there is nothing about him found in Sanskrit…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist For such a vast coastline, Indians do not have much of a sea mythology. Most images of boats in Indian art are related to ponds and rivers, and not the sea, such as images of Ram and Sita crossing the Ganga, or Krishna and Radha on…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Everything in nature has an expiry date. Even the sun. Talk to an astrophysicist and they will tell you when the sun will eventually die. Nothing lasts forever. We know that. Yet, culture is all about ‘built to last’. The obsession with defying mortality, defying nature,…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist It is common amongst Western scholars and their Westernised students to differentiate between the Vedic yagna and the Puranic puja, rituals that define the two major phases of Hinduism, one that flourished over 3,000 years ago and one that emerged 2,000 years ago. Of course, at…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The Gita is a part of the Mahabharata. It is the dialogue of 700 verses between Krishna and Arjuna just before the Kurukshetra War, where the Pandavas fight the Kauravas. This dialogue is found in the Bhisma Parva, one of the 18 books of the epic….

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik Some feminists expect me to ‘explain’ Hinduism’s misogyny. Typically, a verse from Manusmriti will be thrown at me. For example, verse 2.213: It is the nature of women to seduce men in this world; for that reason the wise are never unguarded in the company of females. Or verse 5.151: Girls are…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Ancient India was known as Arya-varta, or the land of the noble people. In the early scriptures, the extent of this region was described as the forests where the black buck roamed. Hunting deer, the black buck, was the favourite pastime of kings in Vedic times….

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist The Buddha and his followers used to always eat one meal in the house of a layman. King Pasenadi of Kosala asked the Buddha how a monk chose a house to eat at. The Buddha replied that it will be a house that one trusts. The…

By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist Valmiki composed the Ramayana and it is still popular though no one reads the old 2,000-year-old Sanskrit version nor the 1,000-year-old regional classics in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, Awadhi. What we usually access as colloquial folk versions, often transmitted orally, known as the Ramakatha….