Indra Slays Vishvarupa and the Coming of Vritra
Source: Bhagavata Purana, Canto 6, Chapters 7–9
It began with a slight — or what Indra took for a slight. The sage Durvasa, that famously volatile rishi, arrived at Indra's court bearing a divine garland fragrant with celestial perfume. He offered it to Indra as an act of honor. Indra, seated on his elephant Airavata, accepted the garland with casual indifference and placed it on the elephant's head. Airavata, disturbed by the scent, knocked it to the ground and trampled it.
Durvasa's fury ignited instantly. He cursed Indra: let all prosperity depart from the three worlds, let *Lakshmi* (divine fortune) abandon heaven, let the glory of the gods wither. And it did. The Bhagavata describes the aftermath with precision — the gods grew careless, Lakshmi withdrew, their strength diminished, their rituals lost power, and the *asuras* under Bali pressed the advantage and drove the gods from their own kingdom.
Stripped of Swarga, the gods sought counsel from Brahma, who directed them to Vishnu. Vishnu advised a specific remedy: churn the cosmic ocean to recover the nectar of immortality, but to do it they would need to ally with the asuras to move the great serpent Vasuki and the mountain Mandara. This was the prelude to the famous *Samudra Manthan* — the churning of the ocean — but the thread that concerns Indra here runs parallel.
Before the churning resolved their crisis, the gods needed a priest, a *purohita*, to perform their sacred rites. Their previous priest had left. Brihaspati, the preceptor of the gods, furious at Indra's ingratitude and disrespect over the years, had simply vanished, abandoning heaven. The gods, desperate, approached Vishvarupa, the three-headed son of Tvashtr.
Vishvarupa agreed to serve as their priest, but he had three mouths and a divided loyalty. With one mouth he offered oblations to the gods; with the second, to the ancestors; with the third — secretly — to the asuras, who were his maternal kin. When Indra discovered this hidden offering that fed the enemy, he drew his *vajra* and struck off all three heads of Vishvarupa without deliberation.
The sin of slaying a brahmin — again, *brahmahatya* — fell on Indra for the second time. But the consequences this time were more immediate than internal. Tvashtr, Vishvarupa's father, was enraged to a grief beyond consolation. He performed a great sacrifice specifically to produce a destroyer of Indra, pouring offerings into the fire with mantras of terrible intent. From those flames rose Vritra — vast, dark, a being so immense that the description in the Bhagavata compares him to a collapsed mountain, filling the horizon.
Vritra was what Indra's own impatient violence had called into existence. The demon who would swallow the waters, rout the gods, and force Indra to seek Dadhichi's bones and the fashioned vajra — all of it traced back to a moment in Indra's court when a garland fell under an elephant's foot, and a god was too proud to apologize, and too quick afterward to act without restraint.
The two stories — the garland, the three heads, the churning, and Vritra's birth — form a single arc in Canto 6 of the Bhagavata. Indra's position as king of the gods was never a settled throne. It was something he lost and recovered, damaged and repaired, always in proportion to whether his power outpaced his wisdom.