Manashree Dhar
3 min readNov 22, 2020
“Indra, the King of Swarga”

Woopsie Dasie! Here we go again! (*cringe)

Just imagine this, *On a pasture filled mountain, Jason Momoa’s holding a Trishul with a cobra winding his neck, in a tiger skin skirt and Jerad Leto walks in with some sheep; dressed in white with his luscious long hair flowing around him in thick waves with the breeze wisping around them and little birds crooning, you turn towards your left and see Michael B Jordan on a tree playing the flute, in a dhoti with a morepankh in his hair, suddenly the ground beneath your feet shakes, you look around frantically and notice the earth opens up. Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the mountain) bursts out of the earth on a buffalo with a noose flying through the sky, with a welkin ring.

With Mozart’s Symphony №40 In G Minor playing in the background (while I am writing this), it’s one coruscating scene in my head.

Ab imagination ko isse note par samapt karte hue, wouldn’t we all love to see some strong Indian Mythology characters in Stan Lee’s style? (I stan, do you?)

We’ve all been obsessed with Marvel and DC characters and with Percy Jackson, Zeus, Hercules, from Greek Mythology while watching movies or reading novels, and so have I (obviously).

So, talking about Zeus, he is often characterized as the King of all Gods, King of Olympus, The God of lightning, storm, sky, thunder, and is often referred to as a ‘womanizer’. But, doesn’t Indra Dev the “Swarg ke Raja”, also have the same powers and strengths? Instead of a Trident like Zeus, he uses a Vajra, but, other than that, he also has a similar reputation with (um) women? Right? I mean, the guy was literally cursed to be castrated for seducing a maharishi’s wife (awkward, eh?)

Indra doesn’t only have similarities with Zeus from Greek mythology but while studying other mythologies one also comes across similar characters, like “Thor” in Germanic mythology, “Perun” in Slavic Pantheon, and “Perkunas” in Baltic mythology.

(I am pretty well aware you must not be familiar with these mythologies, par Thor aur Zeus toh sabko he pata hai, I mean HELLO, Chris Hemsworth)

If we notice a majority of world religions have the same backstories, similar abilities of gods, maybe not a very similar character portrayal yet have an uncanny similarity.

Just like in Christian mythology we have Noah who was asked to build an ark, the vessel in the Genesis flood narrative through which God spares Noah, his family, and pairs of all the world’s animals from a world-engulfing flood. The story in Genesis is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the Ark appears as Safina Nūḥ (Nuh ibn Lumik ibn Mutushalkh) and this same story is repeated in Hindu mythology where Manu was warned by a fish that a flood would destroy the whole of humanity and so he had to build a boat. When the flood came, he tied this boat to the fish’s horn and was safely steered to a resting place on a mountaintop (according to Matsya Purana). This doesn’t just stop here if you check out the Mesopotamian arks of Babylonian flood-heroes Atrahasis and Utnapishtim. They have a similar story aswell, the difference is Atrahasis’ Ark was circular, resembling an enormous Quffa, Utnapishtim’s ark was a cube with six decks, Noah’s Ark was rectangular with three decks and Manu sported a boat led by a massive fish (Vishnu’s Matsya avatar). There is believed to be a progression from a circular to a cubic or square to rectangular, apparently, it is said even though all these vessels were noted to be of different shapes, they had near-identical deck areas.

So, this quite literally tells us that we all have the same gods just different authors of this one story that we read in different languages with different book covers, yet it is the same story which means that we also have the same creator, the same god. Just like if 4 different authors wrote about the year 2020 and the pandemic in three separate countries in their own perspective and like Chinese whisper the story was twisted and the names changed yet it remains to have the same origin.

This is my opinion and my observation, I do not mean to offend anybody or any religion by any means. This is written purely to show the similarity in scriptures and to diminish the differences.

Manashree Dhar
Manashree Dhar

Written by Manashree Dhar

A homo-sapien made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, a pinch of potassium, who loves art in all forms and delivers long harangue about the mysteries of a mind.

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