Brahma is the creator among the three great gods of the Trimurti, Brahma who makes, Vishnu who preserves, Shiva who dissolves, and yet, by a striking paradox, he is by far the least worshipped of the three, with almost no temples dedicated to him anywhere in India. He is depicted with four heads, facing the four directions, and four arms, holding the Vedas, a water-pot, a rosary and a sacrificial ladle, seated on a lotus or riding the hamsa, the swan or goose. In the best-known cosmogony he is born from a lotus that grows out of the navel of Vishnu as the latter reclines on the cosmic waters, and from Brahma the ordered world unfolds; his consort is Saraswati (also called Savitri), the goddess of speech, learning and the Vedas.
Puranic tradition offers more than one story to explain why a creator god should be so little worshipped. One widely told version has Brahma originally possess five heads until Shiva, angered by a lie Brahma told during a dispute over which of them was supreme, cut off the fifth and cursed him never to be worshipped on earth; a separate tradition tied specifically to Pushkar tells that Brahma's wife Saraswati, arriving late for an essential fire-sacrifice there, was replaced at his side by a local woman named Gayatri, and Saraswati's furious curse on witnessing this is what closed off worship of Brahma everywhere except at that one lake. Neither story is treated as definitive scripture, and regional tellings vary, but both explain the same striking absence documented across Indian temple architecture.