Hindu family tree

Drawing a single family tree for this tradition requires an admission up front: there is no single tree, and the major sources are not trying to produce one. Different Puranas place the same deities in different relations to one another, deliberately, because the placement is a theological claim about who is supreme. A chart that resolves those claims into one diagram has taken a side without telling you.

So this diagram draws the relationships that a given text gives, and marks which text gives them.

The problem in one example

Ask who created Brahma and you get answers that are incompatible by design. In the Vaishnava account, Vishnu sleeps on the serpent Shesha on the cosmic ocean, a lotus grows from his navel, and Brahma is born in it — the creator god is thereby derived from Vishnu. In Shaiva texts, Shiva is the ultimate reality from whom both Brahma and Vishnu proceed, and there is a well-known episode in which the two of them try and fail to find the ends of a column of light that is Shiva. In Shakta texts, the Goddess is prior to all three and they act by her power.

None of these is a variant folk tale. They are the positions of distinct devotional traditions, each with its own scriptures, and each internally consistent. The diagram carries all three as marked alternatives at the root.

The Vedic layer, which is a different cast

Above and behind the familiar deities sits the older Vedic pantheon, and its relationships mostly do not carry forward. Indra, king of the gods in the Rigveda, becomes a subordinate figure in the Puranas who is routinely defeated and requires rescuing. Agni, Varuna, Vayu, Surya and the Ashvins are prominent in the hymns and marginal later. Rudra, an outsider archer god, is the ancestor of the classical Shiva but is not simply him.

The diagram shows this as a separate stratum rather than as ancestry, because the later gods are not descended from the Vedic ones — the pantheon was reorganised, not extended.

The households

What the tradition does supply, in abundance, is family groupings, and these are stable enough to draw with confidence.

• Shiva and Parvati, with their sons Ganesha and Kartikeya (Skanda, Murugan). Ganesha's birth is given several ways: made by Parvati from the substance of her own body and beheaded by Shiva who did not know him, in the best-known version, with the elephant head supplied afterwards. Kartikeya's birth involves Shiva's seed carried by fire and the Ganges and six Krittika nurses, producing a child with six faces.
• Vishnu and Lakshmi, who emerges from the churning of the ocean of milk and chooses him. Vishnu's avatars — Rama, Krishna and the rest — are drawn as descents into the world rather than as offspring, because that is what an avatar is.
• Brahma and Saraswati, a relationship the texts themselves treat awkwardly, since she is described both as his daughter and as his consort.
• The Goddess, who in Shakta theology is not a consort at all. Durga is born from the combined energies of the male gods after they fail against the buffalo demon, and Kali emerges from Durga's brow in battle. The diagram draws these as emanations, which is the sources' own language.

Where relationship is identity

A recurring feature that a European-style chart handles badly: goddesses are frequently described as forms of one another. Parvati, Durga, Kali, Uma, Gauri and Sati may be presented as distinct goddesses, as aspects of a single Devi, or as successive births of the same being — Sati dying and being reborn as Parvati is a narrative that makes the identity explicit.

The diagram uses a distinct link for "is a form of", separate from descent and from marriage, because collapsing it into either would misrepresent the theology.

The human genealogies

Two enormous mortal lineages matter here and are drawn where they touch the divine. The solar and lunar dynasties structure the epics: Rama belongs to the solar line of Ikshvaku, and the Pandavas and Kauravas of the Mahabharata to the lunar line. The Pandavas are each fathered by a god — Dharma, Vayu, Indra, and the Ashvins — through a boon, which puts divine parentage into a family whose succession dispute is the poem's subject. Krishna belongs to the Yadava branch of the same lunar descent.

Reading the diagram

Solid lines are relationships that the major Puranas broadly agree on. Broken lines carry a note naming the text and, where relevant, the tradition whose position it represents. Avatar links, emanation links and "form of" links each have their own notation, because treating them as birth would flatten distinctions the sources make carefully.

Where a figure is worshipped today under a relationship that a Sanskrit text does not give — and regional traditions frequently differ from the Sanskrit corpus — the diagram follows the text and the note records the living practice. For why this material is layered the way it is, and why "Hindu mythology" is not one corpus, see the tradition hub.