Indra is the twenty-sixth nityayoga, named for Indra, king of the gods. It is one of the auspicious yogas, favourable for undertakings connected with leadership, authority, honour, and success in worldly affairs. Reckoned from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it advances as the lights separate through the month. In the panchanga it contributes its favourable, sovereign quality to the reckoning of an auspicious time. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which a benefic yoga bearing the name of the king of the gods commends a moment for matters of rank and command; the astronomical basis remains the simple arithmetic of the two luminaries' summed longitude over the lunar month.
Indra, king of the Vedic gods and lord of rain, thunder and war, occupies a curious position in later Hindu religious history: central and dominant in the earliest layer of the tradition, the Rigveda, where more hymns are addressed to him than to almost any other deity, he is gradually eclipsed in later Puranic literature by Vishnu, Shiva and the great goddesses as objects of devotional worship, becoming more a figure of myth and moral instruction, notably as a somewhat flawed and anxious ruler of heaven, than an object of temple cult. The twenty-sixth nityayoga's association with leadership and worldly success preserves something of Indra's older character as sovereign of the gods even as his independent worship faded.