Indrāṇī (इंद्राणी) carries a double identity. In the Veda she is the wife of Indra, king of the gods, invoked in her own hymn of the Ṛgveda as the most fortunate of women, and known in later literature as Śacī, daughter of the demon Puloman. In the Purāṇic cult of the seven mothers she is Aindrī, the śakti of Indra, a goddess who wields the king of heaven's own power. The two figures flow into one another: consort and energy were never sharply divided in Indian theology.
In the texts
As a Mātṛkā she appears in the Devī Māhātmya, issuing from Indra when the gods surrender their energies to the Goddess in the war against Śumbha and Niśumbha. Her iconography reproduces Indra's: she is golden or red-hued, rides the elephant, canonically Airāvata, wields the vajra, the thunderbolt, and is sometimes described, like her lord, as thousand-eyed. In the sequence of seven mothers she conventionally stands sixth, before the outlier Cāmuṇḍā.
Queen of heaven
As Śacī she figures throughout epic and Purāṇic story as the model of the devoted royal wife, standing by Indra through his humiliations and restorations, and her name yields one of Indra's own epithets, Śacīpati, lord of Śacī. Tradition in parts of eastern India honours her at the close of Durgā Pūjā; more broadly she shares in the collective worship of the Mātṛkās, in whose panels the queen of the gods fights as one mother among seven.
Further reading
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Klostermaier, Klaus K. A Survey of Hinduism. State University of New York Press, 2007
- Lipner, Julius. Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge, 2010
- Stietencron, Heinrich von. Hindu Myth, Hindu History. Permanent Black, 2005
See also
This entry was last revised on 31 July 2026.