Indra

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Indra is the warrior-king of the early Vedic pantheon — god of storm and battle, wielder of the vajra or thunderbolt, and the deity to whom more hymns of the Rigveda are addressed than to any other. He is a god of force before he is a god of order: red-bearded, vast, prodigious in his appetite for the pressed juice of soma, which the hymns describe him drinking before he goes out to fight.

His central deed is the killing of Vṛtra. The texts tell it as the founding act of the cosmos: Vṛtra, a serpent or dragon, lies coiled over the mountains and holds back the waters, and the world is stopped until Indra, strengthened by soma, splits him open with the thunderbolt and lets the rivers run to the sea. The Vedic poets return to this combat again and again, and what they make of it is double — at once a thunderstorm breaking a drought and the victory of life and movement over a power that would keep everything held and unborn. Scholars have long read the Vṛtra hymns as one of the clearest Indo-European instances of the storm-god-against-the-serpent pattern, the same shape that recurs in the myths of neighbouring peoples; the resemblances are real and much studied, though what the Rigveda itself means by the fight is bound to its own ritual language of waters, light, and the dawn.

Indra’s standing did not hold. In the Vedic age he was effectively the chief god, the one a fighting, cattle-keeping people called on for rain and victory; but as Hindu thought developed he was displaced. The great theistic traditions gave the highest place to Viṣṇu and Śiva, and the later texts reduce Indra to a lesser figure — still king of the gods and lord of the heaven called Svarga, yet fallible, repeatedly humbled, troubled by his own pride and by the sages whose austerities rival his power. Where the older hymns celebrate his strength, the epics and Purāṇas often turn it into a lesson about its limits. The Upanishads mark the turn from another side: in the Chāndogya, Indra appears as a pupil who must be taught, across long years, the knowledge of the self that his might cannot win for him.

He kept a wide presence even so. Buddhist tradition absorbed him as Śakra, ruler of one of the heavens and a frequent attendant in the life of the Buddha, and in that role he travelled across Asia. The thunderbolt itself outlasted the god’s supremacy: the vajra became a ritual implement and a name for the indestructible, carried into Tantric and Vajrayāna practice long after the king who first wielded it had ceded the summit of the pantheon to others.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, SBE I & XV)

→ Related: Soma · Kali · Lakshmi