Indra Puja

At the monsoon’s close (Bhadra–Ashwin), Mithila’s plea to the rain-king is mostly embedded in the women’s Jhijhiya dance of Dashain/Navratri — perforated, lamp-lit pots balanced on the head as the women circle, braiding devotion to Durga with a prayer for rain and a good paddy harvest.

A more formal “Indra Puja” — a pandal, offerings, Madhubani paintings of clouds and elephants, and a community bhoj — is reported around Madhubani, but thinly; the rain-plea more often surfaces as an ad-hoc drought rite than a fixed calendar puja.

In the Rigveda Indra is the dominant god — named in over a quarter of its hymns — king of the devas, wielder of the vajra, who slays the serpent Vritra to release the withheld waters: the very charter for worshipping him for rain.

But the Bhagavata Purana tells how the cowherds’ annual Indra Puja was set aside: Krishna bade them honour Govardhan hill instead, and when an enraged Indra loosed a deluge, Krishna lifted the hill on his finger for seven days until Indra’s pride broke. That episode — and Indra’s post-Vedic demotion below Vishnu, Shiva and Devi — is why his direct worship faded into Govardhan/Annakut.

As a standalone festival Indra Puja is largely vestigial in Mithila today — its impulse survives mostly inside Jhijhiya at Dashain, in scattered, thinly-documented Madhubani “Indra Puja” events, and in ad-hoc drought rites when the rains fail. The Bhadra–Ashwin slot belongs to Durga Puja, and Indra’s old rain-thanks now flow into Govardhan/Annakut at Diwali.

The one place the festival is still grand is across the border: Indra Jatra in Kathmandu — eight days, the Yosin pole and Indra banner, and the Kumari chariot — remains Nepal’s biggest religious street festival, timed to the monsoon’s retreat over the ripening paddy.

Indra was once the greatest of gods — the Rigveda’s thunder-wielding king who slew Vritra to free the rains, and the dedicatee of the royal Indradhvaja banner that secured a kingdom’s victory and good monsoon. But his star fell: the Puranic tale of Krishna lifting Govardhan humbled his pride, his worship gave way to Govardhan/Annakut, and in Mithila the rain-king’s own festival has dwindled to a faint trace — a plea folded into the women’s Jhijhiya dance, a drought-year prayer, the memory of a pole. The grand Indra still stands only in Kathmandu’s Indra Jatra. We keep this entry not because the festival is large in Mithila today, but because the rain-king’s long retreat is itself part of the region’s religious story — honestly told.