# Krishna is blue why? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [November 25, 2003, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/krishna-is-blue-why/215102 "2003-11-25T02:51:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![One\_Bad\_Kitty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/51bf81/32.png) [@One\_Bad\_Kitty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/One_Bad_Kitty)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2003, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/krishna-is-blue-why/215102/1 "2003-11-25T02:51:59Z")
link to article: [http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980724.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a980724.html) If I remember correctly, isn’t the color blue associated with infinity and immortality? I could have sworn… 😕 ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2003, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/krishna-is-blue-why/215102/2 "2003-11-25T12:24:50Z")
The _Srimadbhagavatam_, a Hindu scripture about the life and works of Krsna, describes his color as “dark like a cloud” (_megha shyamala_). But what color is a cloud? Clouds can be all kinds of colors. You can see clouds that are red, white, \*\*black, gray, \*\* bluish, yellowish, or other hues, depending on the atmospheric conditions and the time of day. Actually, the name _Krsna_ comes from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘black’. Krsna, like Osiris in the ancient Mysteries, “is a black god!” The name of another Hindu deity, Kali, also means black. I read the depiction of Krsna as blue as an artistic convention used for identifying Krsna in art, the way medieval Christian saints were identified in art according to a standard set of symbols. Blue _could_ be another way of interpreting the canonical description of “dark like a cloud.” The Aryan Brahmin-dominated religion of Hindus has never really acknowledged its debt to the indigenous Dravidian material it has absorbed over the millennia. The Dravidians, who were in India before the Aryans entered bringing their Vedic scriptures, are a dark-skinned people. Much of what is known as Hinduism today is in fact not found in the Vedas at all, but came from Dravidian origin. The prominence of dark-skinned deities like Krsna, Kali, and Shiva attests to a strong but understated Dravidian influence in the development of Hinduism. Racism against people of darker skin color may play a role in denying the debt owed to the dark-complexioned people. This whole what-color-is-Krsna topic reminds me of when I was a kid in Catholic school in the 1960s, being indoctrinated in the Civil Rights Movement, anti-racism. The nun who was my 4th-grade teacher kept playing for us a song called “What Color is God’s Skin?” It’s about a man putting his child to bed at night who innocently asks him this question. The chorus went like this: _What color is God’s skin? What color is God’s skin? I said: It’s black, brown, it’s yellow It is red and it’s white, Every man’s the same in the good Lord’s sight._