Svarga is a celestial paradise in Hindu cosmology, the heaven of the god Indra atop or beyond Mount Meru, where the virtuous enjoy the fruits of their good deeds amid splendour, pleasure, and the company of the gods and celestial nymphs (apsaras). But its defining and theologically crucial feature is its impermanence. Svarga is a reward, not a final liberation: the soul that has accumulated good karma enjoys its pleasures there for as long as that merit lasts, and when the store of merit is exhausted, it must leave and return to the cycle of rebirth on earth.
The Bhagavad Gita is pointed on this: those who follow ritual for the sake of heavenly reward "attain the heaven of Indra and enjoy the pleasures of the gods... having enjoyed that vast world, when their merit is spent, they enter the world of mortals again." Svarga is thus, within the karmic worldview, a golden but temporary station, structurally parallel to the temporary hells of Naraka, both are the impermanent fruits of action, and neither is the goal. The true aim lies beyond both: moksha, release from the entire wheel of pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, birth and death. Svarga stands as the tradition's reminder that even heaven, if it is only the wages of good works, is a place one must someday depart.