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| Background | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Indra is the god of War and Weather, also the King of the gods or Devas and Lord of Heaven or Svargaloka in Hinduism. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mentioned first as the chief deity in the sacred Hindu text of Rig Veda, Indra is bestowed with a heroic and almost brash and amorous character. He has always remained significant in Indian mythology, from Vedic to Puranic times, as the primary ruler of all devas, even as his reputation and role diminished in later Hinduism with the rise of the Trimurti. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Indra is attested as a god of the Mitanni. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Indra is the chief god of the Rigveda (besides Agni). He delights in drinking Soma, and the central Vedic myth is his heroic defeat of Vritra, liberating the rivers, or alternatively, his smashing of the Vala, a stone enclosure where the Panis had imprisoned the cows, and Ushas (dawn). He is the god of war, smashing the stone fortresses of the Dasyu, and invoked by combatants on both sides in the Battle of the Ten Kings. |
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The Rig-Veda frequently refers to him as Śakra - the mighty-one. In the Vedic period, the number of gods was assumed to be thirty-three and Indra was their lord. (The slightly later Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad enumerates the gods as the eight Vasus, the eleven Rudras, the twelve Adityas, Indra and Prajapati). As lord of the Vasus, Indra was also referred to as Vāsava. |
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