Brahma Ji

Brahma is the creator god of the Hindu Trimurti, alongside Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. Yet despite his exalted role he is strikingly little worshipped today: almost no temples are dedicated to him, a paradox that is itself part of his story.

Svayambhu ("self-born"), Pitamaha ("grandfather" of all beings), Chaturmukha ("four-faced") and Prajapati ("lord of creatures") name him as the origin of creation. He should not be confused with Brahman, the impersonal absolute of the Upanishads, a distinct concept despite the similar name.

He is shown with four faces turned to the four directions, reciting the four Vedas, and with four arms holding a water-pot (kamandalu), a rosary (mala), a sacred text, and often a sacrificial ladle or a lotus. He is typically bearded and seated on a lotus, accompanied by his mount the swan (hamsa). The lotus recalls his birth: he is said to emerge from a lotus growing from Vishnu's navel.

Puranic tradition explains his lack of worship through a curse. In one widely told account, Brahma spoke a falsehood in a contest with Vishnu over who could find the ends of Shiva's infinite pillar of light, and Shiva cursed him to receive almost no worship. In another, tied to Pushkar, his consort Savitri, angered that he began a great fire-sacrifice with another goddess in her place when she arrived late, cursed him to be worshipped nowhere but Pushkar. Either way, the tradition uses a curse to account for a genuine historical fact: organised Brahma worship faded early.

His consort is Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, in most accounts (also named as Savitri or Gayatri, treated as forms of one goddess of the Vedas). He is called the grandfather of gods and beings, and many sages and Prajapatis are said to descend from him.

Doctrinally he completes the Trimurti as the principle of creation, and he appears constantly in mythology as the deity who grants boons, often, tellingly, to demons, setting cosmic crises in motion. In lived devotion, however, he is honoured far more in cosmology and story than in temple worship.

The Jagatpita Brahma Temple at Pushkar in Rajasthan, its present structure dating to around the 14th century, is by far the most important, and almost the only prominent, temple dedicated to him; Pushkar's annual fair and its sacred lake draw large pilgrim crowds. A handful of other Brahma shrines exist across India and Southeast Asia (notably the much-visited Erawan shrine in Bangkok), but nothing rivals Pushkar's association with him.