India, July 16 -- Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist

The goddess we call Saraswati today begins as Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech, identified primarily with the Vedic deity Vac. Her earliest stories foreground the immense power and sometimes the deceptive nature, of the spoken word. These are found in ritual Vedic texts known as the Brahmanas.

When the Gandharvas stole the sacred Soma, the gods offered Vac as a young woman to trade for it. A competition followed: the Gandharvas recited the Vedas, but the gods sang and played the vina. Vac chose music over recitation, returning to the gods and establishing her eternal link with the instrument. This myth quietly explains how a speech-goddess acquired her vin...