The Oldest God of India: 7 Ancient Answers to Who Was Worshipped First

By Dr. Narayan Rout | Author | Researcher |    India Series | Spirituality and Faith Series |    54 min read  ·  Published: November 10, 2026

Contents of This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Key Takeaways
3. Why is it so hard to say who the first God of India was?
   1. Table 1. Four ways of asking ‘who was first?’
4. Was the first God of India a Mother?
5. Who is the horned yogi of Mohenjo-daro?
6. Why did the first Indians bow to trees and animals?
7. Was the first God of India the sky itself?
8. Is Agni the first God in India’s oldest book?
9. Who were Indra, Varuna and the other gods of the Rigveda?
   1. Table 2. Who is praised most in the Rigveda? (approximate hymn counts)
10. How did Rudra become Shiva, and how did Vishnu and the Devi rise?
    1. Table 3. How the old gods changed their faces
11. Who are the gods who never left the village?
12. So who was the first God of India? The answer beyond names
    1. Table 4. Seven ancient answers to ‘who was worshipped first?’
13. The Quest Sage Insight: Five Clues to the Oldest God
    1. Table 5. The five clues at a glance
14. What You Can Do With This
15. Conclusion
16. Frequently Asked Questions
17. References and Sources
18. FURTHER READING ON THEQUESTSAGE.COM

Picture a grandmother in an Odia village at dusk. She has lit a small lamp at the foot of the old tree at the edge of the lane, pressed a pinch of vermilion on a smooth, shapeless stone, and gone back to shelling peas on her doorstep. Her grandson, who has just learned in school about temples and kings and ancient civilisations, sits down beside her and asks the question every Indian child asks sooner or later. Aji, which God came first? Which is the oldest god of India?

She doesn’t answer at once. The peas keep dropping into the steel bowl. Then she says, quite calmly, “The one who was here before the names.” And that, she seems to feel, is that.It’s a remarkable answer, and I’ve come to think it’s also a remarkably accurate one. Because the question she was asked isn’t a simple one. Ask a Shaiva and he’ll say Shiva, the Lord without beginning. Ask a Vaishnava and she’ll say Vishnu, who rests on the waters before the world is made. Ask a Shakta and the answer is the Mother, from whom even the gods are born. Ask a Vedic scholar and he’ll point to Agni, whose name is the very first word of the oldest book. Ask a Santhal elder and he’ll turn, without a word, and point at the mountain. Everyone is right. Everyone is also, in a sense, answering a slightly different question.

In the last century and a half, a second kind of seeker joined the conversation: the archaeologist with a trowel, the linguist with a dictionary of dead languages, the epigrapher with a magnifying glass. They have dug a triangular stone out of a river valley in Madhya Pradesh, lifted clay women out of the mud of Balochistan, cleaned a thumb-sized seal at Mohenjo-daro, read cuneiform tablets in Turkey that call upon gods with Sanskrit names, and traced a Greek ambassador’s pillar in Vidisha. Their findings are astonishing, and scholars read many of them in different ways. I won’t pretend otherwise, but I also won’t spend this article refereeing those debates. This is an article of faith. I’ll tell you what the stones, seals, hymns and village shrines whisper, in the spirit in which a devotee would listen to them, and I’ll tell you honestly where each clue leaves off and the interpretation begins.

Here is the thread that I’ll follow, and I’ll state it plainly now so you can test it as we go. The first God of India was never a single name. It was an experience, of the Mother beneath the foot, the Fire in the hearth, the Sky overhead, the Water in the river and the Tree at the edge of the village, and the Indian mind kept refusing to shrink that experience into one word. The names came later, and there were many of them, and that was by design.

We’ll walk through seven ancient answers to the question: the Mother, the Horned Yogi, the Tree and the Beast, the Sky Father, the Fire, the Thunder-King and his companions, and finally the One who was here before the names. In between, we’ll watch how the old gods changed their faces over the centuries and visit the gods who simply never left the village. If you’ve ever lit a lamp, touched a tree, or bowed to a stone without quite knowing why, I think you’ll recognise yourself somewhere on this road.

The oldest book that humanity still chants aloud begins, fittingly, not with the creation of the world but with a spark.

Why is it so hard to say?: This section shows that ‘first’ can mean the oldest shrine, image, name or linguistic root. Each lens points to a different god, from the Mother to Agni. It matters because it lets you hold the question without forcing a single answer. The Mother: This section follows the Baghor shrine, the clay women of Mehrgarh and the Indus figurines. A triangular stone about 11,000 years old resembles the stones still worshipped as the goddess today. It matters because the oldest sacred place found so far appears to belong to the Mother. The Horned Yogi: This section visits Indus seal 420 and the debate over ‘Proto-Shiva’. The seated, horned figure among wild beasts echoes the later Lord of Beasts, though scholars differ on its meaning. It matters because it shows how an ancient image can speak to living faith without needing a verdict. Tree and Beast: This section explores the pipal and animals of the Indus seals and their echoes today. The Aranyani hymn, the Gita and the Bishnoi martyrs all treat trees as sacred relatives. It matters because it reveals nature as the oldest layer of Indian worship. The Sky Father: This section traces Dyaus Pita through Zeus, Jupiter and the Sanskrit deva, then to the Mitanni treaty. The Vedic gods were already known in West Asia by about 1380 BCE. It matters because language and clay together show how old these divine names are. Agni: This section follows the first word of the Rigveda from the Vedic hearth to the digestive fire. Fire is the most intimate of the gods and was honoured across Indo-European cultures. It matters because every household can still serve the oldest god with its own hands. Indra, Varuna and rta: This section sets out the Rigvedic pantheon, from Indra’s monsoon victory to Varuna’s moral order. Indra, Agni and Soma dominate the hymn counts, and the poets crown each god supreme in turn. It matters because it shows a mind that treated every name as a doorway. The old gods change faces: This section traces Rudra to Shiva, Vishnu to Vasudeva-Krishna and the rise of the Devi. The Gudimallam lingam, Kushan coins and the Heliodorus pillar mark the turning points. It matters because it shows one divine reality wearing the faces that each age could recognise. The gods who never left: This section visits Gram Devatas, Kul Devatas, Sarna groves and the Jagannath tradition of Odisha. Village, family and forest deities have been honoured without a break and have often shaped the great temples. It matters because the oldest God is the one your family still bows to. The One beyond names: This section brings the seven answers together and ends with the Nasadiya hymn. The poet asks who truly knows how creation began. It matters because it shows a tradition that kept faith and questioning together.

Because ‘first’ can mean four different things: the oldest sacred object found in the earth, the oldest image of a divine form, the oldest name written or chanted, or the oldest root of a name in language. Each question points to a different god. India has quietly kept all four answers alive.

Let me show you how strange this gets with two discoveries made half a world of time apart. In 1931, John Marshall, the former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, published a seal from Mohenjo-daro showing a seated figure with a horned headdress surrounded by animals. He called it ‘Proto-Shiva’. The seal is roughly 4,500 years old. Five decades later, in a river valley in Sidhi district of Madhya Pradesh, a team of archaeologists lifted a small, naturally triangular stone from a platform of rubble. They thought it might be the remains of a goddess shrine. That stone is roughly 11,000 years old, more than twice as ancient as the seal. So which is the first? A god, or a goddess? A figure with horns, or a stone with no face at all?

The honest answer is that the question needs sharpening before it can be answered. Historians do this by splitting it into four. I’ve found that the split is also a lovely way to organise a pilgrimage through India’s memory, so here it is.

The Question	What counts as evidence	The candidate	Rough age
Oldest sacred place or relic	A shrine, platform or stone found in an excavation	The Mother (Shakti), at the Baghor shrine	About 9000 to 8000 BCE or older
Oldest divine image	A figurine or seal showing a god-like form	Mother figures; the horned figure on the Indus seal	About 2600 to 1900 BCE (figurines earlier at Mehrgarh)
Oldest written or chanted name	Hymns and inscriptions naming deities	Agni, Indra, Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatyas	About 1500 to 1000 BCE; a treaty of about 1380 BCE
Oldest root in languageWords for gods	Words for gods shared across related languages	Dyaus Pita, the Sky Father; Agni, the Fire	Reaching back to the Indo-European past

Notice how modest every column is. A stone cannot tell you its own name. A seal can’t speak. The Indus script has never been deciphered, so the thousands of short inscriptions on those seals are still silent. The Rigveda, our oldest chanted text, was composed and carried in the memory of families for a very long time before anyone wrote it down. In fact, I find that one of the loveliest facts in all of this: the first scripture of India was not a document at all. It was a living thing, handed from throat to ear, father to son, with such discipline that the same hymns are chanted today. It’s one reason the tradition of Vedic chanting was recognised by UNESCO as a masterpiece of oral heritage, and a reminder that real education once meant becoming a carrier of knowledge, not a collector of notes.

Even the words we use are slippery. Bhagavan, the word many Indians use for God today, comes from bhaga, a share of fortune, grace and glory. The early Vedic poets mostly used deva, ‘the shining one’. They hadn’t yet settled into the grammar of one God or a ladder of gods. They simply looked at the dawn, the storm, the fire and the river and said: something is here, and it shines.

There’s one more thing worth saying before we begin our walk, because it keeps the whole enterprise honest. A question like ‘why do human beings gather round stones, trees and fires and call them sacred?’ is itself a question about behaviour, the kind I explored in the article on evolution, karma and the selfish gene. Science may someday tell us a great deal about why the human mind reaches for the sacred. It will never be able to tell us whether the sacred reached back. That part belongs to faith, and that’s the part we’ll be walking with.

The oldest sacred place yet found in the Indian soil is probably a shrine to the Mother. A triangular stone on a rubble platform at Baghor, in the Son valley of Madhya Pradesh, dated to roughly 11,000 years ago, resembles the stones that tribal families still worship as the goddess today.

Let’s go there. The Son flows north out of the Maikal hills and runs along the base of the Kaimur escarpment, a long, flat-topped ridge of sandstone that glows orange at sunset. About four kilometres from the village of Medhauli, near a bend in the river where an oxbow lake once held water, a band of hunter-gatherers once made a camp. We don’t know what they called themselves. We know what they ate and what they made. They chipped chert into tiny blades and geometric microliths, small enough to be set in rows into wooden handles. They built hearths. They ground seeds. They stayed a short time and moved on.

In the early 1980s, an international team arrived to dig the site. G. R. Sharma of Allahabad University and J. Desmond Clark of the University of California directed the work, with the young Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and J. N. Pal assisting in the field. They were looking for stone tools, and they found them in great quantity. But at one spot they also found something odd: a small, deliberately cleared platform of rubble, and set in the middle of it, ten refitting fragments that together made a roughly triangular stone, about fifteen centimetres high, with traces of yellow pigment on its surface. Nobody had carved it. It was a natural piece of local sandstone. But someone had carried it up and set it down in the centre of a platform and, perhaps, coloured it.

What the excavators did next is the part I find most moving. They walked around the neighbouring countryside and asked who lived there and what they worshipped. About a kilometre to the northeast of the dig stands a small village shrine called Kerai ki Devi, a low circular platform of sandstone and limestone rubble on which six upright stones with triangular or ellipsoidal markings are set. In Medhauli village itself, at the foot of a great neem tree, there’s another shrine: an earthen plinth topped with a stone slab and loaded with oddly shaped blocks of limestone and sandstone, including more triangular stones. The local people, shown the stone from the excavation, are reported to have said the same thing: it was the right sort of stone for the goddess.

The Kol and Baiga communities of the region regard the triangular stone as the Mother, whom they call Mai, and who is known by many names: Kerai, Kari, Kali, Kalika. Their communities have traditionally lived by forest, hill and river, as the ancient hunters did. And in their sacred geography, the Mother is not a distant queen in a golden hall. She’s under the neem tree. She’s on a rubble platform at the edge of the field. She smells of wood smoke and turmeric. The excavators published their conclusion in the journal Antiquity in 1983, with a question mark in the title: An Upper Palaeolithic shrine in India? They said there was a very strong possibility that the stone and its platform formed a shrine to the Goddess, the female principle, Shakti.

To their credit they were careful. Desmond Clark, one of the great prehistorians of the twentieth century, himself voiced his doubts about religious readings of what he called esoteric finds. Eleven thousand years is a very long stretch of time to claim an unbroken line of belief, and honest scholars don’t leap it lightly. But look at what the careful people were willing to say: that this is the earliest candidate for a ritual structure yet found in the subcontinent, and that it looks astonishingly like the shrines people still tend today. A person of faith might add, with a smile, that continuity is exactly what faith is.

The same early excavation paper includes a charming ethnographic note about a forest goddess of central India, Bansapatti, who is believed to preside over the trees and their fruit, the bees and their honey, and the safe arrival of children. A village woman who longs for a child prays to her, and the village man who lights a new kiln fire does so in her name. Reading that, you can almost hear the first hunters of the Son valley, thanking the forest for its gifts.

Now let the clock run forward by a couple of thousand years, to the dry plain of Balochistan, in what is now Pakistan, near the Bolan River. In 1974, the French archaeologists Jean-François Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige began digging at a place called Mehrgarh. What they uncovered was a village that had been there since about 7000 BCE: mud-brick houses, granaries, cattle, barley and wheat. It was one of the earliest farming settlements known anywhere in South Asia.

As their trenches reached the layers from the sixth millennium BCE, something quite lovely began appearing in the soil. Small clay figures of women. Some were seated. Some held infants. Some wore painted ornaments and had elaborate hairstyles, and the figurines became more detailed as the centuries went by. Up to a certain point in the long history of the site, every human figurine that the farmers made was female. In some of the graves, the dead were laid to rest with ornaments, with the bones of sacrificed animals, and with red ochre sprinkled over them, an old and almost universal gesture of respect for the departed, perhaps a hope that the colour of blood might carry life into the next world.

What did these figurines mean to the people who made them? Here the careful scholars again raise a hand. Some writers, such as Lynn Meskell, have warned us not to project our own images of ‘mother goddesses’ onto objects that could be toys, ancestors, offerings, or portraits of ordinary women. That is a fair caution, and I’ll hold it in mind. But the tradition has its own way of reading faces in the clay, and so I’ll put the clay figures in front of you and let you decide what you see. Women who hold babies. Women who are adorned. Women whose images were made by the thousand, again and again, across thousands of years, by farmers whose lives depended on the fertility of the soil and the body.

The same thing happens in the great cities of the Indus, which flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BCE. At Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Kalibangan and Lothal, excavators found clay women by the thousand, many with fan-shaped headdresses, heavy necklaces, and small cups attached on either side of the head. Marshall, who was the first to publish them, noticed black soot inside those cups and in nearby vessels, and imagined them as little lamps lit for a goddess in the home. From Harappa comes a seal showing a woman turned upside down, with a plant sprouting from her womb, which he read as an image of the Earth who gives birth to the plants. Modern scholars have pointed out that the distribution of such figurines across the Indus region is uneven, and that they could have had many uses. Both observations are fair. And yet a devotee will note that whenever archaeologists ask what the people of the early villages and cities held most sacred, the first hand that rises is a mother’s.

Now notice how the story rhymes with the oldest hymns. The Rigveda’s great goddess is Ushas, the Dawn, who rolls back the darkness each morning. It also sings of Aditi, the boundless Mother of the gods, and of Prithivi, the Earth, who in one hymn of the Atharvaveda is hailed with a line so tender that it has been quoted ever since: the Earth is my mother, and I am her son. A hymn in the Rigveda’s tenth book puts the voice of the Goddess herself, Vak, in the first person, declaring that she moves with the gods, upholds the world and gives wealth to those who honour her. The Devi Mahatmya, composed many centuries later, will give this ancient reverence a spectacular new form in the great warrior goddess Durga. But the tune was there from the start.

So, was the first God of India a Mother? If we follow the oldest stone shrine, the oldest farming-village figures, and the oldest city-dwellers’ clay women, the finger of the archaeologist and the finger of the devotee, for once, point in the same direction. Not as a proof, but as a pattern. And the pattern says that before Indians learned to name the gods of thunder and fire, they had already learned to bow to the ground beneath their feet.

He is the most famous face in Indian prehistory: a seated figure on a small Indus seal, horned and many-faced, ringed by animals. John Marshall called him Proto-Shiva and Pashupati, Lord of Beasts. Faith recognises something of Shiva in him. Scholars, wisely, remain divided about what the maker intended.

Walk with me into Mohenjo-daro at the height of its life, around 2500 BCE. The lanes are laid out in an orderly grid. The houses are built of standardised baked brick, with bathrooms and drains that lead into covered sewers. The air smells of woodsmoke, kilns and river mud. In a workshop near the main street, a craftsman has taken a small square of soft steatite, no larger than your thumb-joint, and is carving into it, with great precision, the picture of a man.

This is how Seal No. 420 looks to us after forty-five centuries. The figure sits on a low platform, legs folded, heels together, knees turned outward, hands resting on the knees. On his head is a tall headdress with two great horns curving up and out and what looks like a plume between them. His arms are covered with bangles. He seems to have three faces, one looking forward and the others turned to either side. Around him are four animals, an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo, and below the platform stand two deer. Above him run lines of the undeciphered Indus script, still silent.

The seal was unearthed in the 1920s by Ernest Mackay, one of Marshall’s field directors. When Marshall published it in 1931, he made one of the boldest leaps in the history of Indian archaeology. This, he said, was a god. The three faces, the seated posture of a yogi, the lord surrounded by wild beasts: all of it spoke of Shiva, who in later texts is called Pashupati, the Lord of Animals, and who is the great Yogi, the Mahayogi of the Himalayas. Marshall called the figure Proto-Shiva and argued that the roots of Hinduism reached back into the cities of the Indus. For millions of Indians, the image went straight to the heart. Suddenly the Mahayogi seemed to have been sitting in his posture of meditation for forty-five centuries.

Archaeologists, being what they are, have argued about it ever since. Gregory Possehl, one of the most respected scholars of the Indus, pointed out that horned headdresses were widely used as marks of authority across the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia to the Gulf. The figure might be a priest, a chieftain, or a mythical being rather than a god. And interpreting a seated posture as yogic, he warned, applies a later lens to an earlier object. The Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who spent a lifetime studying the Indus script, has offered a gentler middle road: that the Indus world contributed images, rituals and perhaps even words, which were slowly reassembled, over the second millennium BCE, into what we now call Hindu traditions.

I find the middle road very attractive, because it doesn’t ask us to decide between the poet and the scholar. Here’s how I’d put it. We do not need the seal to prove Shiva. We need only notice that the human mind of that city, 4,500 years ago, already had a picture in it of a figure who sits perfectly still while wild animals gather peacefully around him. That’s an astonishingly resonant image for a civilisation that would one day produce the Yoga Sutras. It’s also the image of a being who is master of the wild and yet remains utterly calm. The tradition has always known who that is.

There is a small, gentle detail I’d like you to carry from this seal into the rest of the story. The yogi isn’t alone. He sits with creatures around him. In India, the very idea of the holy has rarely been separate from the living world. The Indus seal places the divine, if divine it is, in the middle of the forest and not above it.

And the later texts do, in their own way, tell the story of this figure. In the Rigveda, Rudra is a small presence, addressed in only a handful of hymns as a fierce archer of the storm and also, surprisingly, as a healer with a thousand remedies. In the Yajurveda, a famous litany called the Shatarudriya praises him by a hundred names, among them the Lord of the Beasts. By the time of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the seer says boldly that Rudra is the One God, and that there is no second. In a thousand-year journey, a storm deity of the margins becomes the Mahadeva. I’ll come back to that journey. For now, simply keep the horned yogi in mind as a candidate for the oldest face of a God that Indian faith still recognises.

Because for them the forest, the river and the herd were not scenery but relatives. The Indus seals, which show more animals and trees than gods, suggest that sacred nature, not abstract divinity, may be the oldest layer of Indian worship, and the village still keeps it alive.

If you hold one of the Indus seals in your palm, the first thing you notice is not a god. It’s an animal. A great humped bull, shoulders heavy, with neck folds drawn as a series of lines. A buffalo with its head lowered. A tiger. An elephant. A rhinoceros. And most often of all, a creature with one long horn, the so-called unicorn, standing before a curious object that looks like a ritual stand or a feeding trough. More than anything else, the Indus seals show animals. What do they mean? Perhaps clans, perhaps trade marks, perhaps the signs of gods, perhaps all three at once. The seals don’t say.

Alongside the animals, again and again, there are leaves. The leaf of the pipal, the Ficus religiosa, with its heart-shaped blade and long drawn-out tip, appears on seals and pottery of the Indus. One famous seal shows a figure standing within the arching branches of a pipal tree, while a kneeling worshipper bows before it and a goat-like animal waits as an offering. Another well-known seal shows a row of seven standing figures, which later imaginations have read as the Seven Mothers or the Seven Sages. Every such reading is a guess. But look at what the guess keeps returning to: a tree, a worshipper, a sacred animal. These are the ingredients of the village shrine, as you can still find it today in a hundred thousand Indian hamlets.

Go back to Baghor for a moment, to the shrine of the goddess in Medhauli at the foot of a great neem tree. Go to the sacred groves of Chhota Nagpur, where the people of the Munda, Ho, Santhal and Oraon communities protect a patch of sal trees so strictly that no branch may be cut, no animal hunted, and no fruit gathered without permission, because the village deity lives there. Go to the pipal at the crossroads of nearly every Indian town, wound with threads, smeared with vermilion, with a small oil lamp burning in the hollow of the trunk. You might as well be standing in the Indus.

The Vedic poets saw it, too. In the tenth book of the Rigveda there’s a short hymn of only a few verses to Aranyani, the Goddess of the Forest. The poet speaks to her directly: she who seems to vanish among the trees, why does she never ask the way to the village, and is she not afraid? She harms no one unless someone provokes her. At nightfall, says the poet, one might imagine that someone is screaming in the forest, but it is only Aranyani. And when the poem ends, it ends not in fear, but in a kind of tenderness: she gives food in abundance, though she tills no field. The Atharvaveda sings of the ashvattha, the pipal, as the seat where the gods sit. The Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna enumerates his divine glories, says, among trees I am the ashvattha.

And the animals? They never left either. Look at how every great deity of the Indian tradition arrives with a companion. Shiva with the bull Nandi. Vishnu with Garuda, the eagle of the sky. Durga with the lion. Ganesha with a small and very clever mouse. Kartikeya with the peacock. The goddess Lakshmi with the owl and the elephant. It is as though the old Indus conviction that the animal and the god belong together was too deep to be abandoned. It simply became iconography.

The most famous modern echo of all comes from Rajasthan. In 1730, in a village called Khejarli near Jodhpur, soldiers sent by the local ruler came to fell the khejri trees for timber to build a palace. A woman named Amrita Devi of the Bishnoi community hugged a tree and refused to let go. She was killed, and then her daughters, and then, as the news spread, hundreds of her community members, who in tradition number three hundred and sixty-three, gave their lives rather than see the trees cut. The ruler withdrew his order and the Bishnoi grove remains protected. If you ask a Bishnoi villager why, he won’t talk about ecology. He’ll talk about dharma. And that, I think, is the oldest answer of all.

In the memory of language, yes, the oldest divine name may be the Sky Father. Sanskrit Dyaus Pita, Greek Zeus Pater and Latin Jupiter are one word in three costumes, which suggests that the ancestors of Indians and Europeans once honoured the shining sky as father, long before they parted.

Here the evidence changes shape completely. We leave behind the earth, the clay, the shrine, and we step into the strange country of words. Pottery breaks, and stone erodes, but a name that is said every day by a family can travel across continents. This is the discovery that stunned European scholars in the late eighteenth century, when they first realised that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic languages were descendants of a common tongue, spoken by communities who lived thousands of years before the earliest written word.

Among the words that survive in all these languages, one of the most magnificent is the name of the god of the bright sky. The Indo-European root is something like dyeu, ‘to shine’. In Sanskrit, it becomes Dyaus, and the father is Dyaus Pita. In Greek, he is Zeus, and in the vocative the Greeks called out Zeu pater, ‘Father Zeus’. In Latin it is Iuppiter, Jupiter, which literally means ‘sky-father’. In the Germanic world, the same ancestor god gives his name to Tuesday. And from the same root comes the Sanskrit deva and the Latin deus, the very words for ‘god’. When a Hindu says deva and an ancient Roman says deus, they are saying one word. Somewhere in the dim past, the ancestors of both peoples looked up at the shining sky, felt something vast and fatherly, and gave it a name that has never completely stopped being spoken.

In the Rigveda, Dyaus has already begun to recede. He’s the father, but a rather distant one. The poets prefer to praise him together with his partner Prithivi, the Earth, as a pair called Dyava-Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, who are celebrated as the parents of all the gods and all the world. It’s a beautiful image, and a familiar one to anyone who has ever stood in a field after the first monsoon rain. The sky pours down, the earth takes it in, and life rises.

Now let me take you to a very different place: a clay-tablet archive in the Hittite capital of Hattusa, in the heart of what is today Turkey. In 1907, the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler was digging at the site, now called Boğazkale, when his team uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets. Among them was a treaty. It had been drawn up around 1380 BCE between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I and Shattiwaza, the exiled prince of the kingdom of Mitanni, who had come to him for help in regaining his throne. As was the custom in the ancient Near East, the treaty ended with a list of divine witnesses, the gods before whom each king swore his oath. Among the Hittite storm gods, and the Hurrian and Babylonian deities, scholars found four names that made them catch their breath. Mitra. Uruvana. Indara. Nasatiyana.

To anyone who knows the Rigveda, those names are unmistakable. Mitra and Varuna, the guardians of the cosmic order. Indra, the thunder-wielding king. And the Nasatyas, the twin horsemen otherwise called the Ashvins. Here, written on clay in a language that had nothing to do with Sanskrit, in a land far to the west of the Indus, were the very gods of the Rigveda, called as witnesses to a royal vow. Elsewhere in the archives at Hattusa, a horse-training manual written by a Mitanni trainer named Kikkuli uses number words that sound startlingly like Sanskrit: aika, tera, panza, which sound like eka, tri, pancha, one, three, five. A scholar’s caution is in order here as well: the Hittite text was written by a Hittite king, and some argue that the Sanskrit-like names belonged to a small ruling class rather than to the Mitanni people as a whole. But the main point stands for everyone, believer or sceptic. By about 1380 BCE, the gods whose names we find in the Rigveda were already known, honoured, and trusted enough to witness a treaty between kings.

That is a thrilling thought. And it has a gentle implication for our question. If those gods were already travelling the ancient world in the fourteenth century BCE, then the divine names of the Rigveda are older than the Rigveda itself, and the Sky Father older still. As the sky is, in its own way, the oldest thing that every human being has ever seen.

This is an idea that I’ll ask you to hold lightly but not forget. The Sanskrit word for space, sky, and ether is akasha. The Taittiriya Upanishad says that from the Self, space arose, and then air, fire, water and earth. The Chandogya Upanishad, in a famous dialogue, is even more direct. When the question is asked, what is the final resting place of this world? the answer is: space. All beings arise from space and return to space. An ancient Indo-European family, looking up at the shining sky, reached for a father. An Upanishadic sage, looking at the same sky, reached for the Self. The direction of their gaze was the same.

Yes. The very first word of the Rigveda is Agni, and its first hymn greets fire as priest, god and messenger. Whatever the soil and the seals may say about earlier shrines, the oldest book that India still recites begins by bowing to a flame.

Imagine the hour before sunrise in a Vedic household, perhaps three thousand years ago, perhaps a little more. It’s cold. The river is silent. A man sits before a small clay hearth, with two pieces of wood in his hands. The lower piece is flat and carved with a hollow; the upper one is a pointed stick. He sets the stick in the hollow and begins to twirl it with a cord, steadily, with a patience that doesn’t hurry and doesn’t stop. A thread of smoke rises. A spark falls on dry grass. The flame wakes.

The poets looked at that moment and saw a birth. The two pieces of wood, they said, are the two mothers, the arani. The spark is the child. The ritual action of making fire was agni-manthana, the churning of Agni. When the flame stood up in the hearth, the poet greeted it as a guest of honour. And then, in the first verse of the first hymn of the Rigveda, he sang what has been sung ever since: I praise Agni, the household priest, the divine minister of the sacrifice, the invoker, the greatest giver of treasure.

Why Agni, and why first? Because fire is the most intimate of the gods. It lives in the home. It cooks the meal, warms the child and lights the evening. It stands in the middle of the marriage ceremony, where bride and groom walk seven steps around it, and it stands at the end of life, on the pyre. It is the messenger who carries the offerings of mortals to the immortals, and so it is the mouth of the gods. The Vedic poets even speak of Agni’s three births: in the heavens as the sun, in the waters as lightning, and on the earth as the fire we kindle. A later Indian scholar, Yaska, in his old work on Vedic words, sorted the gods into three realms of earth, air and heaven, and placed Agni first among the gods of the earth.

Now, the language evidence nods in agreement. The Sanskrit word agni is a cousin of the Latin ignis, from which we get ‘ignite’, and of the Old Slavic ogni. In ancient Iran the sacred fire was called Atar, and the fire temples of the Parsis keep a flame burning for centuries. In a Hittite text from the same region, a name that looks very much like Agni turns up. This means that when a Vedic poet greeted Agni, he was honouring something that his distant cousins in Rome, Persia and Anatolia also honoured in their own tongues. The fire at the hearth was among the first temples that humanity ever had.

And what about the Indus? In some of the great Indus sites, such as Kalibangan in Rajasthan and Lothal in Gujarat, excavators have found rows of small fire pits, lined with burnt brick and containing ash and bones. Some scholars have read these as fire altars, a hint that fire rituals were practised even before the Vedic poets sang. Others see kitchen or industrial hearths. It’s an open question. But it’s worth remembering that people who light a fire carefully, and sit around it, are already halfway to worship.

There’s something lovely about the way the tradition has carried Agni forward. The Vedic fire sacrifice, the yajna, grew into the daily Agnihotra, a small offering at sunrise and sunset, which many families still perform. The household flame became the sacred lamp in the evening, the diya that your own grandmother lights at the tulsi plant. And the fire went inward as well. The Gita, in the fifteenth chapter, has Krishna say that he becomes the fire of digestion, vaishvanara, within the bodies of all living beings, digesting the four kinds of food. Ayurveda took the idea and made it a medical principle: the jatharagni, the fire in the belly, on which health depends. In the Indian view, you carry Agni inside you at every meal. I looked at how that thought shaped India’s table in the article on India’s ancient food culture.

Perhaps that is why, when you ask people to name the oldest God they know, a surprising number of them don’t say a name at all. They say something like: the flame. The one you can see, feel, light, and hold your hand near, but cannot grasp. The one that is both a guest and a god, both a tool and a teacher. It’s the oldest god that every household can still serve with its own hands.

They were the great powers of the Vedic sky, earth and moral order. Indra, the thunder-king, is praised in about 250 hymns, Agni in about 200 and Soma in about 123. Varuna and Mitra guard rta, the cosmic and moral law that holds the universe together.

The Rigveda is a vast thing. It contains 1,028 hymns, grouped in ten books called mandalas, and about ten and a half thousand verses. Scholars generally place its composition between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE, though the tradition itself holds that these hymns were seen by the ancient seers rather than composed by anyone. For many centuries the whole text travelled by word of mouth. The Vedic reciters developed ingenious methods, in which each word was recited forwards, backwards and in interlocking patterns, so that a single syllable could not be altered without breaking the chain. That discipline preserved the hymns with an accuracy that astonishes modern scholars.

If you count the hymns by their divine addressee, the pantheon of the Rigveda has a very distinctive shape. I’ve put it in a table, using the classic count of the translator Ralph Griffith. The exact numbers differ a little depending on how you treat paired hymns, but the picture is clear.

Deity	Hymns (approx.)	Who is this?
Indra	about 250	Thunder-wielding warrior and king; slayer of the serpent Vritra, liberator of the waters and the cows
Agni	about 200	Fire; household priest and divine messenger
Soma	about 123	The sacred plant and its juice; the whole ninth book is devoted to him
The Ashvins	about 56	Twin horsemen of the dawn; healers and rescuers
Varuna	about 46	Lord of the waters and the sky; keeper of cosmic and moral order
The Maruts	about 38	Storm-gods in Indra’s company
Mitra	about 28	Friendship, the sacred bond; Varuna’s partner
Ushas	about 23	The Dawn; the most prominent goddess of the Rigveda
Vishnu	about 5 – 6	He who strides across the cosmos in three steps; a companion of Indra
Rudra	about 3-5	Fierce storm archer and healer

Look at the bottom of that table. Vishnu and Rudra, the two deities whose later forms would dominate Indian devotion for two thousand years, have only a handful of hymns each. The word shiva itself appears in the Rigveda mostly as an adjective meaning ‘auspicious’ or ‘kindly’, and not yet as a name. Brahma, Ganesha, Hanuman, Rama and Krishna don’t have central roles at all. If you opened the Rigveda looking for the gods of your temple, you might feel you’d walked into the wrong house. And yet I’d ask you to notice something else: the house is full of light. The gods of the Rigveda are not stone images in a shrine. They are the dawn, the fire, the storm, the rain, the river, the wind, the sun and the order that holds them together.

Take Indra first, the most celebrated of them. In the story the poets loved best, the world is in drought. A great serpent called Vritra has coiled around the mountain and swallowed the waters. The rivers can’t flow. The cows can’t give milk. Indra drinks Soma until he swells with courage, takes up his thunderbolt, the vajra, and strikes the serpent down. The mountain splits. The waters rush out and run to the sea like cows to their calves. It’s the oldest monsoon story in India, and in it you can hear a farming people’s deepest hope: that the great clouds will break open and the world will be fed.

Then there is Varuna, whose character is so very different. Where Indra is the hero of the storm, Varuna is the quiet king who sees everything. He is the guardian of rta, the great law of the universe: the order by which the sun rises, the seasons turn, the rivers run and truth is distinguished from falsehood. For the Vedic poets, rta was both a physical and a moral law, the same order that makes the stars keep their courses makes the honest man keep his word. It is, in its own way, the Vedic ancestor of the Indian concepts of dharma and satya. Anyone who has marvelled at the constancy of physical law, the steady constants of nature that I discussed in the article on the fundamental constants, or at the strange power of mathematics to describe the universe, has felt a little of what the poet felt before rta.

And there is Soma, the strangest of the Vedic gods: a plant, a drink, a deity and, in the ninth book, a flowing stream of light that pours through a sieve of sheep’s wool as the priests chant. A verse from the eighth book gives a flash of its mystery: We have drunk the Soma, we have become immortal. Whatever Soma was in botanical terms, and scholars have argued about this for a century and a half, to the poets it was the very sap of immortality, the juice of the cosmos, the moon’s own nectar.

One of the most intriguing features of these hymns struck the nineteenth-century scholar Friedrich Max Müller. A poet addresses one god, and at that moment, the god is called the greatest, the creator, the king of all. A few hymns later, to another god, the same language is used. Max Müller coined a term for it, henotheism, or sometimes kathenotheism: devotion to one god at a time, each in turn exalted as supreme. Some Indians feel that the term misses the point, and I’m one of them. To me this doesn’t look like confusion. It looks like a mind that sensed from the very beginning that every name was a window onto the same light, and that no window was the whole sky.

So which of the Vedic gods was first? If you go by sheer number of hymns, it’s Indra. If you go by the first word of the text, it’s Agni. If you go by sheer age, those names were already in the Mitanni treaty, and so we may say that Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas were already travelling the world in the fourteenth century BCE. If you go by the moral depth of the earliest layer, it may be Varuna and the rta that he guards. The Rigveda won’t make the choice for you. It leaves the throne a little empty on purpose.

Over about a thousand years, the minor gods of the Rigveda grew into the great deities of Indian devotion. Rudra the storm archer became Shiva, the Lord of Lords. Vishnu, the cosmic strider, merged with Narayana and Vasudeva-Krishna. And the ancient reverence for the Mother returned in the full splendour of Durga and the Devi.

Let’s begin with Shiva, because his story is the most dramatic. In the Rigveda, Rudra is a marginal figure: dangerous, a little frightening, living on the edges of the settled world. The poets ask him to spare their cattle and their children and not to shoot his arrow at them. And yet in the same hymns he is also described as the best of healers, with a thousand remedies. This duality, the fierce and the kind, is the seed of everything that follows.

In the Atharvaveda and the Yajurveda, the god begins to gather new names: Bhava, Sharva, Ugra, Pashupati, and the gentle adjective shiva, ‘the auspicious one’, which gradually becomes a name. The great litany of the Shatarudriya, in the Yajurveda, salutes him in a hundred forms, as the Lord of the forests, the Lord of paths, the Lord of thieves and the Lord of the healers. By the time of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, perhaps a few centuries before the Common Era, the poet declares with astonishing confidence that Rudra alone is the one God, who has no second. The storm archer has become the Supreme Being.

Stone and metal begin to confirm what the texts say. At Gudimallam in Andhra Pradesh, a small temple holds a very early lingam, carved from a single block, with a standing figure of the god on its front, holding a ram and a water pot. Art historians date it to the early centuries of the Common Era or even earlier, and it’s often considered the oldest surviving lingam image in India. And across the north-west, the Kushan king Vima Kadphises, who ruled in the first or second century CE, issued coins showing a figure with a bull, and a legend calling him Maheshvara, the Great Lord. A king of foreign descent was proudly stamping the face of Shiva on his money.

Now, Vishnu. In the Rigveda he is a god of remarkable simplicity. The poet says: I will proclaim the heroic deeds of Vishnu, who measured out the earthly realms in three strides, and who, with those strides, props up the vast world. He is a friend and ally of Indra. In the later Vedic texts, the Brahmanas, he becomes identified with the sacrifice itself. In the great epic, the Mahabharata, he merges with Narayana, the cosmic being who rests on the waters, and with Vasudeva-Krishna, the hero of Mathura and Dwaraka. The devotional religion that grew around Vasudeva was called Bhagavata, and its followers were Bhagavatas, ‘devotees of the Lord’.

There is an inscription that tells this story as no book can. About 113 BCE, in the little town of Besnagar, near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, a tall stone pillar was raised. It stood in front of a temple of Vasudeva, and on its top stood the figure of Garuda, the eagle. The inscription cut in Brahmi script on its shaft says, in effect: this Garuda-standard of Vasudeva, the God of Gods, was erected by Heliodoros, a devotee of the Lord, the son of Dion, a man of Taxila, who came as the ambassador of the Greek king Antialkidas to King Bhagabhadra. A second inscription adds three immortal precepts which, when followed, lead to heaven: self-restraint, charity and vigilance.

Pause a moment and take that in. In the second century BCE, a Greek diplomat, the son of a man named Dion, who might have grown up hearing the stories of Zeus, stood before a shrine in central India and declared himself a devotee of Vasudeva-Krishna, calling him the God of Gods, and then put his name on a pillar of stone. It’s a small proof of a very large thing: that Indian faith has always been a home that strangers could walk into and make their own. And, as a gentle echo of our earlier story, a Greek follower of Zeus Pater came to the Indian God of Gods, as if the two branches of Dyaus Pita’s family had finally met after thousands of years.

And the Devi? She’s the most interesting of all, because in some ways she is the oldest and the youngest at once. The Rigveda has its dawn goddess Ushas, its mother Aditi, its Earth Prithivi, its river Sarasvati, its Vak, the Word. But the great warrior goddess whom millions worship at Navaratri, Durga as the slayer of the buffalo-demon Mahishasura, takes her full literary form only around the fifth or sixth century CE, in the Devi Mahatmya, a section of the Markandeya Purana. It’s the culmination of a long process in which the Mother, whom the people had never stopped worshipping in the village and the grove, was finally given a grand Sanskrit voice. In that book the gods, defeated by the demon, pour their fierce energies together, and a goddess blazes into being from their combined light. The point is delicate and rather profound: the Goddess is not a late addition to the family of the gods. She is what the gods themselves are made of.

Deity	Earliest layer	Turning point	Where it shows
Shiva	Rudra, the storm archer of the Rigveda (3 to 5 hymns)Shatarudriya (Yajurveda); Shvetashvatara Upanishad makes Rudra	Shatarudriya (Yajurveda); Shvetashvatara Upanishad makes Rudra the One God	Gudimallam lingam; coins of Vima Kadphises (1st to 2nd century CE)
Vishnu and Krishna	Vishnu of the three strides (about 5 to 6 hymns)	Merges with Narayana and Vasudeva-Krishna in the Brahmanas and the Mahabharata	Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar (about 113 BCE)
The Devi	Ushas, Aditi, Prithivi, Vak; and the older Mother of village and groveThe Goddess becomes a supreme deity	The Goddess becomes a supreme deity in her own right	Devi Mahatmya (about 5th to 6th century CE); Navaratri today

What do we make of all this change? A rationalist might say: the gods were invented, merged and reshaped as societies changed. A person of faith says something different. The One was always there. The faces changed because human eyes changed. A storm archer was the way a pastoral people could look at the awesome; the Lord of Yogis was how a meditative civilisation saw the same awe; the Mother of the Universe was how a household-loving people met it. The face is a gift to the beholder. The divine, in the Indian reading, is generous enough to wear any face that a heart can recognise.

They are the Gram Devatas and Kul Devatas, and the tribal gods of mountain, sun and grove. These village, family and forest deities have been worshipped without a break, and the great temple traditions have repeatedly drawn from them rather than replaced them.

Everything we have walked through so far lives in books and museums. This part lives next door. Go to almost any Indian village, and before you reach the main temple, you’ll meet the real guardian of the place. She might be a smooth, shapeless stone under a banyan. She might be a clay horse at the edge of the fields. She might be a small brick platform with a trident stuck in it and a faded red cloth tied around the trunk of a tree. She is the Gram Devata, or in the feminine Gram Devi, the village’s own deity. Nobody in the village needs to be told her name, because she is not a name. She is a presence. She protects the boundary against disease, drought and ill luck. Her yearly festival is the heartbeat of the community’s calendar.

Alongside her stands another deity who belongs not to the village but to the family: the Kul Devata or Kuldevi. Every family in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat and many other parts of India has one, handed down for generations. She or he may be a form of Shiva, Vishnu, Bhavani or Khandoba, or a local goddess nobody outside the clan has heard of. The family’s first invitation at a wedding goes to the Kuldevata. A newborn child may be carried to the Kuldevi’s shrine to have its head shaved. A couple, newly married, would feel that something was left unfinished until they had bowed there. It’s remarkable how much of Indian life is organised around a divinity that most outsiders cannot name.

In Odisha, my own home ground, the village goddess is the Gram Devati, and her festivals are among the liveliest in the state. Go to Berhampur at the time of the Thakurani Jatra, and you’ll see an entire city carrying a goddess through its streets, as it has done for generations. She is not on the grand map of Puranic pilgrimage. She doesn’t have to be. She is the mother of that particular soil.

Further north and east, in the plateau country of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, the great tribal communities keep another form of faith alive: the worship of the sacred grove, called the Sarna in Mundari. The word is related to the sal tree. A Sarna is a patch of forest, usually a few ancient trees of sal, mahua, neem and banyan, where the village deity is said to live. The Gram Deoti, the village deity, receives offerings twice a year. The whole community gathers; the village priest, the pahan among the Munda and the naike among the Santhal, conducts the rites. No tree may be cut within the grove, and no animal harmed. That is conservation by faith, practised without a single sign that says ‘protected area’. The Santhal speak of Marang Buru, the Great Mountain, as the supreme power. The Munda and Ho speak of Singbonga, the shining one, often identified with the Sun. Among their festivals is Sarhul, the festival of the sal flowers, in the spring, when the new blossoms are brought to the grove and the ancestors and the earth are honoured. The spirit of the whole tradition has been summarised in three words that you hear again and again: jal, jungle, zameen. Water, forest, land.

Notice what these communities worship: mountain, sun, grove, earth, water. It’s exactly the list we have been assembling from the Indus seals, the Vedic hymns, and the Baghor stone. And the Sarna communities have a mother, too, the Earth Mother Dharti Ayo, the same one who, in the Atharvaveda, is the mother of the one who sings to her. It is as though the oldest stratum of Indian faith never went underground. It simply went on living in the people who never stopped tending it.

And it didn’t stay apart. In the thousands of years of Indian history, tribal and folk traditions and the Sanskrit tradition have exchanged gifts in both directions. Goddesses of the grove became forms of Durga. Village stones were given Sanskrit names. Great temple rites took up the village customs. Nowhere is this more beautiful than in the temple of Jagannath at Puri. According to the tradition recorded in the Skanda Purana and in the Odia Mahabharata of Sarala Dasa, the Lord was first worshipped in the forest as Nilamadhava, the Blue Jewel, by a Sabara chief named Viswavasu. When King Indradyumna sought the deity, he was led to the sea and found a sacred log, a daru, which the sculptor carved into the wooden forms of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra. To this day the temple’s Daitapati servitors, who perform some of its most sacred duties including the rites of the renewal of the wooden bodies, the Nabakalebara, trace their descent to Viswavasu the Sabara. The Lord of the Universe is served by the children of the forest chief who first found him.

This is why the question of ‘the first God’ has a living answer after all. The first God is the one your grandmother still bows to. She doesn’t say it is the oldest. She says it is hers. And in India, being yours has always been the deepest form of being sacred.

Faith’s answer is not one god but the One that every name points to. The Mother, the Fire, the Sky, the Storm and the Yogi are all faces turned toward the same mystery, which the Rigveda itself says was here before gods and before the world.

Let me gather the threads. We’ve met seven answers, and I’ll set them out in a table so you can see how they fit together. I think of this as a map rather than a verdict.

The Answer	The Clue	The living tradition
1. The Mother	Baghor triangular stone (about 9000 to 8000 BCE); clay women at Mehrgarh and the Indus	Devi, Shakti; Gram Devi; Navaratri
2. The Horned Yogi	Indus seal 420 (about 2500 BCE); Rudra of the Rigveda	Shiva as Mahayogi and Pashupati
3. Tree and Beast	Pipal motifs and animals on Indus seals; Aranyani hymn	Sacred groves, the pipal, divine vehicles of the gods
4. The Sky Father	Dyaus Pita, Zeus Pater, Jupiter; deva and deus	Akasha; Dyava-Prithivi, Heaven and Earth
5. The Fire	First word of the Rigveda; Kalibangan fire pits; Latin ignis, Iranian Atar	Agnihotra, the diya, the wedding fire, jatharagni
6. The Thunder-King and order	Indra, Varuna, Mitra in the Rigveda; the Mitanni treaty (about 1380 BCE)	Indra and the monsoon; rta, dharma and satya
7. The One	Nasadiya hymn; the Rigveda’s own admission of mystery	Brahman; Ishvara; ‘by whatever name you call him’

And now the seventh answer, which is the hardest to put in a table, because it comes from the Rigveda itself. In the tenth book, in the hymn that Indians call the Nasadiya Sukta, a poet stands in the dark before the dawn of time and tries to imagine what there was before anything was. There was neither being nor non-being, he says. There was no sky, no day, no night. What covered everything? What was moving? The poet gives us a picture that is spare and breathtaking: the One breathed, without breath, by its own power. Nothing else existed. Darkness was hidden in darkness. Then desire arose, the first seed of mind, and the sages, searching in their hearts, found the link between being and non-being.

And then, in the final verses, the poet does something I have always found astonishing. He asks the questions that no priest of a certain religion would be expected to ask. Who really knows? Who can say where this creation came from? The gods themselves came after the creation. So who knows where it arose? Perhaps it was held in being by its source, or perhaps not. The one who watches over it from the highest heaven, he alone knows. Or perhaps even he doesn’t know.

Read those lines slowly, and notice what kind of mind wrote them. This is a poet who has stood before the fire, the thunder and the dawn, who has sung of Indra and Agni and Varuna, and who understands that all of those names are late arrivals. The gods came after, he says. The first thing was not a person, not a name, not a throne. It was a stillness that breathed.

That is where the oldest chant of India arrives after all its fire and thunder: at a question mark held up to the sky. It has often struck me that a civilisation which could end its oldest hymn with perhaps even he does not know was never going to settle for a single name for God. The habit of questioning is built into the foundation. It’s the same habit that Indian philosophy later turned into the rigorous schools of Nyaya logic and Vedantic enquiry, and that modern readers will recognise in the discussion of the scientific method and Nyaya.

And there’s a second way of finding the One that the tradition offers, quieter than any hymn. It does not look outward, to the stone and the fire and the sky. It looks at the one who looks. The Upanishads call that inner witness the Self, the Atman, and declare that it is none other than Brahman, the ground of everything. I explored that inward witnessing in the article on Sakshi Bhav. If the Mother, the Fire and the Sky are the outer clues to the first God, the witnessing awareness within each of us may be the inner one, and the most intimate. The oldest God, in this reading, was never somewhere else.

After so many stones, seals and hymns, I’d like to step out of the library and speak plainly. People ask me which God is oldest, and I tell them I don’t think it’s the right question for the heart, though it’s a lovely one for the mind. Here’s what I carry instead: five clues that I believe the ancient Indian mind kept giving us, one after another, from the first shrine to the last village festival. If you want to find the oldest God of India, I would say, don’t begin with a name. Begin with these five.

The first clue is Akash, the sky. Every human being who has ever lived has had the same roof over their head. It is the only temple that has never needed to be built. The ancestors who gave us Dyaus Pita looked up and felt a presence larger than any chieftain, and the Upanishadic seer looked at the same expanse and said that from the Self, space came forth. When I look at the sky, I’m not looking at emptiness. I am looking at the room in which everything else happens. The first God, I believe, was the room.

The second clue is Agni, the fire. Fire is the one element that people make, and that makes people. It cooked the first meals, scared off the first predators, and lit the first nights. It is also the only element that visibly turns one thing into another: wood into light, food into energy, offering into smoke that rises. The Rigveda opens with it. The Gita places it in your belly. For me, Agni is the God of transformation: wherever something becomes something else, Agni is at work. Nothing in the cosmos is more honest about the fact that to give is to become.

The third clue is Jal, the water. The Indus people built great baths and drains and wells, and the Vedic poets sang to the waters as mothers and healers. Water is the first mother of every living being, and every river in India has been addressed as a goddess: Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Godavari, Narmada. Varuna, the lord of the order of the world, was lord of the waters. The Sarna communities of the east put it in a single word: jal. Wherever a river bends, or a well is sunk, Indians sense a presence. I’ve written about how deeply this reverence shaped the engineering of the land, in the article on India’s ancient water systems. Water doesn’t ask to be worshipped. It simply keeps everyone alive, and the heart learns the rest.

The fourth clue is Devi, and especially the Gram Devi and the Kul Devi. I’d place her above all the others in one respect: she is the one who has never stopped being worshipped. The grand deities of the temple wax and wane across the centuries, but the Mother at the edge of the village has had her lamp lit without interruption. She protects the boundary; she watches the harvest; she guards the child. The Kul Devi is the thread that ties a family to its ancestors. When I think of the Baghor stone, and of the stones that stand in village shrines today, I can’t help feeling that the Mother was not the first God because she was the nearest one. You don’t need a temple to meet her. You need only a threshold.

The fifth clue is Vruksh, the tree. Beneath the pipal at the crossroads, a stranger rests, a bride is blessed, a panchayat is held, a thread is tied for a wish. The tree is shelter, shade, fruit, medicine, memory. It is a being that stays in one place for centuries and gives, and in that, it is perhaps the most generous living thing we know. The Indus potter drew its leaf. The Vedic poet called it the seat of the gods. The Gita named it as the finest of trees. The Bishnoi gave their lives to it. For me, the tree is the God who teaches patience, who is rooted in the earth and reaching toward the sky, which is to say the God who holds together the first two clues.

Clue	In the oldest layers	In living practice today
Akash (sky)	Dyaus Pita; Dyava-Prithivi; Upanishadic space as the source	Looking up at the first star; ‘Akash Deep’ lamps lifted into the sky in the month of Kartik
Agni (fire)	Rigveda 1.1.1; Kalibangan fire pits; Latin ignis and Iranian Atar	The diya, the wedding fire, the Agnihotra, the hearth
Jal (water)	Hymns to the Waters; river goddesses; Indus baths and drains	Rivers as mothers; the first sip, the sprinkled drops; Sarna ethic of jal, jungle, zameen
Devi (Gram and Kul Devi)	Baghor stone; Mehrgarh and Indus women; Ushas, Aditi, Prithivi	The village goddess; the family goddess at weddings and births
Vruksh (tree)	Pipal on Indus seals; Aranyani hymn; Gita 10.26	The pipal at the crossroads; sacred groves; the Bishnoi tradition

Notice that these five are not five gods. They are five doors. The Indian mind did something very wise with them: it never let any door become the house. The same sage who bowed to Agni would bow to the river; the same village that worships the Gram Devi tends the sacred tree; the same household that lights the lamp at dusk raises its eyes to the sky. This is not a confused religion. It is a religion that remembered, century after century, that the sacred isn’t a single object but a quality of attention.

So here is my answer to the grandson at the doorstep. The oldest God of India is not a name that came and then was replaced by another. The oldest God is the one you meet when you stop, and look at the sky, at the flame, at the water, at the mother, at the tree, and feel, for a second, that you are not alone. Every name that came after, Indra, Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Jagannath, was an attempt to say in words what that second feels like. The attempts were beautiful. But the second came first.

• Find your own Kul Devata and Gram Devata. Ask the eldest person in your family which deity your family has served and where her shrine is. Write down the name and the story. A tradition that lives only in one person’s memory is only one illness away from vanishing.
• Light a lamp with attention. Once a day, light a diya or even a candle, and watch the flame for a minute without a thought. In that minute you are sitting where the first Vedic householder sat, and Agni is, as ever, a guest.
• Plant a tree, and keep it alive. A pipal, a neem, a banyan or any native species suits. Tend it for three seasons. You’ll understand why people tied threads to trees and never saw them as scenery.
• Treat water as a relative. Notice the first sip of every glass. Close the tap. Visit your nearest river or pond and see what has been done to it. Reverence for water is the oldest conservation policy in India.
• Ask the question the way your grandmother would. Instead of asking ‘which God is oldest?’, ask ‘which way of looking at the world makes me more grateful and less afraid?’ and follow that. The tradition has always trusted the sincere question.

None of this requires you to settle a scholarly debate. It requires only that you take the oldest clues seriously, and live as though the world around you were still holy.

Come back to the grandmother, and to the child at her side, and to the peas dropping into the steel bowl. She said the oldest God was the one who was here before the names. It may be the wisest thing anyone says in this whole story, and now we can see why.

Follow the oldest shrine, and it leads to the Mother, on a rubble platform in the Son valley. Follow the oldest images, and you find the clay women of Mehrgarh, the horned yogi of Mohenjo-daro and the sacred tree on the seals. Follow the oldest chanted words, and you arrive at Agni, Indra, Varuna and the Nasatyas, who were already invoked in a treaty in Anatolia in the fourteenth century BCE. Follow the oldest roots of language, and the Sky Father looks down at you from Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Follow the living village, and you meet the Gram Devi and Kul Devata, who never left.

No single road reaches the end. That, I think, is the point, and it’s a point that the earliest Indian poets seemed to know already. They gave every god a turn at being supreme, they honoured the tree and the river, they bowed to a Mother who needed no temple, and in the end they asked, with open hearts, whether even the highest heaven knows how it all began.

If you carry one thing out of this story, let it be a way of looking. The next time you see a lamp lit at the foot of a tree, or a stone smeared with vermilion at the edge of a field, don’t think of it as a leftover from some earlier, simpler age. Think of it as the oldest sentence of a conversation that has never stopped, between the human heart and the mystery that was here before the names. Faith, in India, has never been a single answer. It has been a very long, very beautiful way of listening.

• Kenoyer, J. M., Clark, J. D., Pal, J. N., & Sharma, G. R. (1983). An Upper Palaeolithic shrine in India? Antiquity, 57(220), 88–94. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00055253; full text: harappa.com PDF
• Cambridge University Press abstract of the Baghor shrine report: cambridge.org; resource page: harappa.com
• Kenoyer, J. M. Palaeolithic Period (entry on Baghor I). encyclopedia.com
• Baghor stone (overview of dating, Kol and Baiga practice, Kerai ki Devi shrine). Wikipedia
• Jarrige, J.-F., & Jarrige, C. Mehrgarh excavations (from 1974); overview: Wikipedia; The Collector
• Marshall, J. (1931). Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization. London: Arthur Probsthain (print). On Seal 420 and the Proto-Shiva debate: Business Standard
• Possehl, G. L. (2002). The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. AltaMira Press (print; no link).
• The Mother Goddess debate in Indus archaeology (Marshall, Possehl, Meskell and others): IAS Point overview; Clark, S. R., The Social Lives of Figurines, review: harappa.com
• Griffith, R. T. H. (1888). The Hymns of the Rigveda; deity hymn counts: Rigvedic deities
• Flood, G. D. (1996). An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press (print; no link).
• The Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni, with the Suppiluliuma and Shattiwaza treaty names: Wikipedia; The Collector; Thieme, P. (1960). The ‘Aryan gods’ of the Mitanni treaties. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 80, 301–317 (print/JSTOR; no direct link).
• Heliodorus pillar, Besnagar (inscriptions, date, context): Wikipedia; Ancient History Sites
• Sarnaism and Sarna sthal (sacred groves, Gram Deoti, Marang Buru, Singbonga, Sarhul): Wikipedia: Sarnaism
• Srivastava, M. (2007). The sacred complex of Munda tribe. The Anthropologist, 9(4), 327–330. doi:10.1080/09720073.2007.11891020
• Mallia, C. R. (2019). Jagannath cult and its linkage with tribal culture. Odisha Review, June–July 2019. magazines.odisha.gov.in
• Choudhury, J. (2006). Sri Jagannath Temple: the nerve centre of Orissan culture. Orissa Review, June 2006. magazines.odisha.gov.in
• Tradition of Vedic chanting, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. ich.unesco.org
• Primary texts: Rigveda 1.1.1, 1.154, 1.164.46, 8.48.3, 10.125, 10.129, 10.146; Atharvaveda 12.1 (Bhumi Sukta); Taittiriya Upanishad 2.1; Chandogya Upanishad 1.9.1; Shvetashvatara Upanishad 3.2; Bhagavad Gita 10.26 and 15.14 (Wisdomlib Gita text); Skanda Purana (Purushottama Mahatmya); Sarala Dasa’s Odia Mahabharata. Consult a standard critical translation.

• Evolution, karma and the selfish gene: 3 theories of why life behaves as it does
• India’s water wisdom: ancient engineering systems
• India’s food culture: ancient nutritional principles
• Sakshi Bhav: the witnessing mind and consciousness
• The scientific method, from observation to Nyaya

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