Vishvakarma, the name means the maker of all or all-accomplishing, is the divine architect and craftsman of the gods, the celestial engineer, carpenter, smith and artist who builds and forges the wonders of the heavens. It is Vishvakarma who constructs the palaces and the flying chariots of the gods, who forges Indra's thunderbolt (in one account from the bones of a sacrificing sage), and who is credited with building the great cities of myth, golden Lanka before it fell to the demon-king Ravana, Krishna's city of Dwarka, and Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. His origins reach back to the Rigveda, where the name Vishvakarman belongs to an abstract creator-figure, the all-maker who fashions the whole world as a kind of cosmic craftsman, a philosophical image of the divine artificer that later crystallised into the personal god of craft and building.
In this developed form Vishvakarma is the patron deity of the working craftsmen of India, the architects, carpenters, metalworkers, sculptors, weavers and artisans, who honour him as the divine source and exemplar of their skills. He is worshipped especially at the festival of Vishvakarma Puja, widely observed in workshops, factories and among craft communities, when tools and machines are cleaned, decorated and set before his image in thanks for the skill of the hands that use them. Vishvakarma is thus both a grand cosmic builder of the gods' abodes and the intimate patron of every workshop.