How Ganesha got his head
The best-known story of GANESHA's elephant head begins with his mother, PARVATI. Wanting someone to guard the door while she bathed, she shaped a boy and brought him to life, and told him to let nobody in. When her husband SHIVA came home, the boy stood his ground, and in the fight that followed SHIVA cut off his head. PARVATI's grief and anger were so great that SHIVA promised to restore him, and the first creature found was an elephant. Its head brought the boy back to life, and SHIVA declared he would be worshipped first, before any other god.
The stories are told in different versions across India, and for Hindus they are sacred, not simply old tales. GANESHA is honoured today as the remover of obstacles, and during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi, huge clay statues of him are carried through the streets of Mumbai and immersed in the sea.
A scribe who could not stop
GANESHA has one broken tusk, and one story explains that too. When the sage Vyasa was ready to recite the Mahabharata, he needed a scribe who could keep up. GANESHA agreed on one condition: Vyasa must never pause. When his pen broke mid-verse, GANESHA snapped off his own tusk and kept writing with that.
He had a long job ahead. The Mahabharata runs to around 100,000 verses, roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey together, and is often called the longest poem ever composed. At its heart is a war between cousins, and just before the battle, KRISHNA, understood by Hindus as a form of VISHNU, gives the warrior Arjuna advice about duty and courage. That conversation, the Bhagavad Gita, is 700 verses long and one of the most widely read religious texts in the world.
The monkey who brought the whole mountain
In the other great epic, the Ramayana, Prince RAMA, like KRISHNA an AVATAR of VISHNU, sets out to rescue his wife SITA, who has been carried off to the island of Lanka by the demon king Ravana. His greatest ally is HANUMAN, a monkey of huge strength and devotion who leaps across the sea to find her. When RAMA's brother is badly wounded, HANUMAN is sent to fetch a healing herb from a mountain in the Himalayas. Unable to tell which plant it is, he lifts the entire mountain and flies back with it.
The Ramayana travelled far beyond India. Thailand has its own version, the Ramakien, painted along the walls of the Grand Palace in Bangkok; in Indonesia it is performed with shadow puppets; and its battle scenes are carved into the stone of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
A river that fell from heaven
GANGA, goddess of the River Ganges, is said to have once flowed only in heaven. When a king prayed for her to come down and bring life to the earth, there was a problem: the force of her fall would have shattered the world. SHIVA caught her in his piled-up hair and let her out gently in streams, and pictures of him often show a small stream of water pouring from his hair to remember it. For how Hinduism is practised today, its worship and festivals, see our Hinduism puzzle in Religion.