Indraइन्द्र

Indra is the king of the devas, wielder of the vajra, bringer of rain, and the deity to whom more of the Rigveda is addressed than to any other. In the earliest layer of Hindu religious literature he is, by a wide margin, the central god.

He is also the tradition's most dramatic instance of decline. Over roughly two thousand years he moved from supreme deity to a figure who appears in Puranic narrative chiefly to be defeated, humbled, out-argued or corrected — usually by Krishna or Shiva or a sage — and who receives essentially no worship today.

What he retains is a structural role. He is Devendra, the office of king of the gods, which is understood to be held for a period and then passed on; he presides over Svarga, the heaven of merit, which is itself temporary; and he is the Dikpala of the east, invoked in the directional rites that open most ceremonies.

He is invoked, in other words, constantly, and worshipped almost never — the opposite of a deity like Hanuman, and a useful demonstration of how different those two things are.

In the Rigveda Indra is dominant. Roughly a quarter of its 1,028 hymns are addressed to him — far more than to any other deity — and he is the warrior god of a pastoral, mobile people: he drinks soma, he breaks fortifications, he wins cattle and water, and above all he kills Vritra, the serpent who holds back the waters, releasing the rivers and, in the hymns' idiom, making the world habitable.

He has clear Indo-European relatives. The vajra-wielding storm god who slays a serpent is a figure attested across the family, and Indra appears in the Mitanni treaty of roughly the 14th century BCE in Anatolia, alongside Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatyas — evidence of the deity's antiquity outside India.

His decline begins in the Brahmana period and is complete by the Puranic one. Several forces converge: the rise of Vishnu and Shiva as supreme deities with full theologies; the shift from sacrificial ritual, in which Indra was the chief recipient, to devotional and temple worship, for which he was not suited; and a change in what a supreme god was expected to be. Indra is impulsive, boastful, frequently drunk on soma, and repeatedly guilty — of killing the brahmin Vritra, of seducing Ahalya. As theology grew more concerned with moral perfection, a god with a character like his could not hold the top position.

The Govardhan narrative is the clearest statement of the transition: Krishna persuades the villagers to stop sacrificing to Indra and honour the hill that actually feeds their cattle. Indra sends storms; Krishna lifts the hill; Indra submits. A text is telling its audience, in narrative form, that the old god has been superseded.

He remains prominent in Buddhism as Shakra, and in Jainism, both of which preserved him better than Hinduism did.

Indra is shown as a golden or reddish king, richly crowned and ornamented, seated on Airavata, the four-tusked white elephant, or in a chariot drawn by tawny horses.

His weapon is the vajra, the thunderbolt — made, in the Puranic account, from the bones of the sage Dadhichi, who gave up his body so the gods would have a weapon capable of killing Vritra. The vajra later becomes a major symbol in Buddhism, where it names an entire vehicle.

He carries a bow, and the rainbow is called Indradhanush, Indra's bow, in Indian languages.

In some Puranic depictions he is covered in eyes — the result of a curse from the sage Gautama after the Ahalya episode, originally a more humiliating mark that was commuted. The detail is characteristic: his iconography carries the record of his failures in a way no other major deity's does.

He is depicted in temple architecture as the guardian of the east, one of the eight Dikpalas, which is where most people encounter his image without noticing it.

Devendra / Devaraja — the office of king of the gods, understood as a position held in succession rather than a permanent identity. Different Indras rule in different cosmic ages.

Shakra — the name used in Buddhism, where he is a devoted follower of the Buddha and appears frequently in the Pali canon.

Purandara — breaker of forts, the epithet most characteristic of the Rigvedic warrior.

Vritrahan — slayer of Vritra, his defining Vedic title.

Dikpala of the east — his surviving ritual role in temple architecture and in the invocation of directions.

Sakka in Theravada and Taishakuten in Japanese Buddhism — the same figure carried east.

Vritra. The serpent holds back the waters and the world is parched. Indra, fortified with soma, kills him with the vajra and releases the rivers. This is the central Rigvedic myth and is retold constantly in the hymns.

Dadhichi's bones. No weapon can kill Vritra, so the sage Dadhichi gives up his body and the vajra is made from his spine. The story is the tradition's standard example of self-sacrifice for a common good.

The brahmahatya. Because Vritra was a brahmin, killing him incurs the gravest guilt, which pursues Indra and has to be distributed among the earth, water, trees and women. The king of the gods spending an episode fleeing his own sin is not a story other traditions tend to tell about their chief deity.

Ahalya. Indra seduces the sage Gautama's wife by taking her husband's form. Gautama curses them both. The episode is one of the best known in Indian literature and has been retold, and re-argued, for two thousand years — with the treatment of Ahalya herself a longstanding point of criticism.

Govardhan. Krishna stops the annual sacrifice to Indra; Indra sends a week of storms; Krishna lifts the hill on one finger. Indra submits and is forgiven.

The procession of ants. In a Brahmavaivarta Purana episode, Indra, building an ever-grander palace, is shown a line of ants by a boy and told that each was once an Indra. The passage — retold by Joseph Campbell and widely quoted since — is among the most effective statements of cyclical time in any literature.

Indra receives very little direct worship today, and this is the most notable fact about his current position.

He survives principally in invocation rather than devotion. He is named in the Dikpala rites that open temple ceremonies as guardian of the east; he appears in the sankalpa and in Vedic recitation, where the Rigvedic hymns to him are still chanted; and he is invoked in rainfall and agricultural rites in some regions.

Indra Jatra in Kathmandu is the significant exception: an eight-day festival, still one of Nepal's largest, in which his banner is raised and the Kumari is carried in procession. It preserves a public Indra festival of a kind that has disappeared in India.

The Indradhvaja or Indra-banner festival was widespread in classical India — it appears in Sanskrit drama and in the Arthashastra — and has almost entirely lapsed.

In Vedic sacrificial ritual, where it is still performed, he remains a principal recipient of offerings, and in that narrow context his ancient position is intact.

There is no widespread vrat, no significant temple, and no body of devotional poetry addressed to him. ॐ इन्द्राय नमः is used in Navagraha and Dikpala contexts rather than in personal devotion.

Indra has almost no dedicated temples, and the absence is itself the point.

Indra shrines within Dikpala schemes — his image appears on the eastern face of a great many temples across India as directional guardian, which means he is physically present at thousands of sites where he receives no worship of his own.

Indra Jatra, Kathmandu — a festival rather than a temple, but the principal surviving site of public Indra observance.

Koneswaram and some Sri Lankan and Southeast Asian sites preserve Indra imagery from periods when he was more prominent.

Ellora and Ajanta carry significant Indra sculpture, some of it Buddhist and Jain rather than Hindu — a reminder of which traditions kept him.

Indra Sabha, Ellora — the Jain cave complex, named for the prominence of Indra figures.

His best-known representations are in Buddhist art, where as Shakra he attends the Buddha, notably in the Sanchi and Gandhara reliefs.

Indra's importance now is largely historical, and it is considerable. He is the evidence that Hinduism is not one continuous system but a tradition that has changed its mind about what a god is. The deity of a quarter of the Rigveda receives no worship today, and nothing was hidden or rewritten to achieve that — the hymns are still recited, and the Puranic stories of his humiliation sit alongside them.

His decline also traces the shift from sacrifice to devotion. Indra was the god of the yajna: powerful, propitiated, and transactional. When the tradition's centre moved to temple worship and personal devotion, the deity best suited to the older mode simply lost his constituency. Brahma's absence has a similar shape; Indra's is better documented because his earlier prominence is so unmistakable.

His flaws are the most instructive thing about him. He lies, boasts, drinks, seduces and incurs the gravest guilt in the tradition's own reckoning — and remains king of the gods throughout. Hinduism was evidently once comfortable with a chief deity who was powerful rather than good, and became less so. That change in expectation is one of the more significant things that happened in Indian religious history.

And the procession of ants is his lasting contribution. That every Indra was once a man and every ant was once an Indra, and that the office turns over endlessly, is a statement about impermanence made all the more pointed by being told about the king of the gods himself — by a tradition that had, by then, already moved on from him.