“Lakṣmī and the Tigers: A Goddess in the Shadows.” In The Archaeology of Bhakti: Mathurā and...

Fig. 4.1. Locations of some of the monuments in Māmallapuram and Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(graphic design by Julia Meyerson).

Lakṣmī and the Tigers: A Goddess in the Shadows

Padma Kaimal

The coastal town of Mahābalipuram in Tamil Nadu fairly bubbles with

monuments hewn from the granite bedrock during the seventh and eighth

century when the Pallava dynasty was at its most powerful and this now

booming resort was a seaport called Māmallapuram (fig. 4.1). These stone

masterpieces all remain to some degree incomplete, and incomplete by the

most culturally flexible definition. Polished and gracefully modelled surfaces

give way suddenly to shallow sketches or naked gouges of the broadest chisel

(Parker 2001). This situation has long intrigued visitors and provoked theo-

ries about the sudden death of patrons, enemy raids, and ambitions to visu-

alize the cosmogonic process (Hirsh 1987; Nagaswamy 1962; Parker 2001;

Rabe 2001; Willetts 1966). I am intrigued by the chance to see creative work

in a raw state, the trace of artists’ hands, and the sense of process that these

shadowy forms convey. These surfaces conjure for me a vision of work from

which artisans have suddenly walked away, taking their tools and leaving

their thoughts resting lightly on abandoned granite surfaces. A second vision

they conjure is of people destroying finished sculptures, scouring rock-cut

temples of one set of meanings presumably to replace them with another

(Dehejia & Davis 2010). Yet another scenario is of ceaseless ocean tides and

periodic tsunamis slowly grinding the cluster of shrines commonly referred

to as the Shore Temple down to soft lumps, and this perhaps a planned

outcome of placing icons on the shore line where nature could perform the

daily ritual lustrations that honoured the divine (Smith 1996).

144 | The ArchAeology of BhAkTi i

I caught a new glimpse of one such shadow in 2011 at the so-called

“Tiger Cave” in Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam (fig. 4.2), a tiny hamlet right on the Bay

of Bengal some 3 kilometres north of Māmallapuram’s Shore Temple com-

plex. I had been to that cave many times before, but this time the light was

just right and my traveling companions were an especially dedicated bunch

who had gathered to brainstorm about just such issues.

1

Braving an August

sun, they peered and debated and shared my excitement as the outlines of

a tableau I recognized from other temples in the area began materializing

before my gaze between the rough marks inside the largest recess of that

carved boulder (fig. 4.3). This essay is about what I have come to see in

that recess and about what those forms, had they been completed, might

have meant to the people who carved them.

In those ridges and striations, I discern the preparatory outlines of a

sculptural tableau of Gaja-Lakṣmī, the goddess of prosperity being bathed

by a pair of elephants (gaja). Her name, Lakṣmī, is a synonym for Śrī

which may be translated as prosperity, auspiciousness, and life-nurturing

force (maṅgala). Elephants are pouring over her pot after pot of water,

the very stuff of prosperity on that monsoon-dependent subcontinent.

Gaja-Lakṣmī is a common subject on Pallava monuments. Lakṣmī’s pres-

ence was a welcome promise for kings to make to their populations. The

surprise is that this subject would have been set here surrounded by the

leonine creatures that elsewhere surround a goddess who receives bloody

offerings.

I maintain that this juxtaposition of Lakṣmī and these creatures is

purposeful and consistent with other goddess imagery in Māmallapuram

and Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam. In this assessment I follow Charlotte Schmid’s

argument (2005) that throughout both sites, goddesses of prosperity and

goddesses of battle present aspects of the same female divine (Devī) whose

unified nature expresses the interdependence of prosperity and victory, a

fundamental tenet of the Pallava kingdom. Other sculptural remnants within

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam reinforce the theme of those interconnections and may

once have done so in response to this Gaja-Lakṣmī alcove.

1

We were part of a workshop called “The Archaeology of Bhakti” at the École française

d’Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry, in August of 2011.

Lakṣmī and the Tigers | 145

Fig. 4.2. East face of the “Tiger Cave,” seen from the northeast, in Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

during the rainy season (photo by the author).

Fig. 4.3. Interior

of the largest alcove

in the East face of

the “Tiger Cave,”

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(photo by Valérie

Gillet; digital editing

by Mark Williams).


The Tiger Cave

“Tiger Cave” is a misnomer, as I will explain, but it is a popular one and so

I will use it throughout this article. (The Sanskrit-Tamilized version, “Yāḷi Maṇḍapa,” is more a precise description of the animals all over it.) This

structure is cut into a long mound of granite protruding from the littoral

bedrock parallel to the shoreline. Carvings of animals, architecture, and

divinities cover its eastern, sea-facing side. The alcove I am interrogating

sits in the northern end of that side. There the stone rises above the sand

some five meters. At its southern end this rock slopes down to plateau at

three to four meters above ground level.

Someone looking at this rock from the shore will see a roughly etched

profile view of an unbridled horse or pony at the far left moving to the

right toward a pair of elephants (fig. 4.4). The elephants present frontally

and we see only their heads. Their trunks wind up to the right which gives

them an air of being in motion. Each bears on its neck a majestic rider

whose upright, seated form is set into a square recess. As neither rider is

finished to any degree of detail, their identity remains open to speculation.

The figure on the right has four arms, but the figure on the left may have

only two and might thereby reference the king as Śiva’s proxy beside the

goddess (Charlotte Schmid, personal communication, July 2012; contra

K.R. Srinivasan 1964: 182). Fewer arms could set up a hierarchy subordinat-

ing the figure at the left to the god at the right. I had initially seen the rider

on the left as Viṣṇu because of his cylindrical crown, and the rider on the

right as Śiva because he rests a right hand on his thigh and lifts a left hand

clenched lightly (cin-mudrā). Because of the elephants, A.H. Longhurst

(1928: 46) read both figures as Indra and K.R. Srinivasan (1964: 182) pre-

ferred to read them as Indra and maybe Skanda.

2

I cannot yet see enough in these figures to feel sure of their identi-

ties either way but I will note that their placement on elephants permits

2

Srinivasan further speculated that the Tiger Cave played host to the sort of Indra festival

at the seashore that the Cilappatikāram describes. That reading, however, depends

upon reading quite unresolved lumps as Indra’s vajra or śakti and on the presence of

elephants. Elephants can also signify Skanda, as Srinivasan admits, and Aiyaṉār Śāstā

as well (see Huntington 1981).


me to imagine them and their mounts in the process of circumambulat-

ing the northern portion of the rock which has been fashioned into a

kind of shrine. This interpretation would make some sense of the rock’s

asymmetry and multiple alcoves by defining the tall northern portion

as the temple and the object of worship for the elephant riders on the

lower southern portion. Other features encourage this reading. A circular

frame around the small recess housing each figure suggested a howdah to

K.R. Srinivasan (1964: 182). It is common nowadays to see caparisoned

elephants walking around Indian temples and carrying on their shoulders

sculptures of gods set in small shrines. The orientation of the elephants at

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam would have them moving in a counter-clockwise direc-

tion (a-pradakṣiṇa), unusual in contemporary practice although sometimes

identified as the path of ascetic renunciation (Joanne Waghorne, personal

communication, April 2012).

Fig. 4.4. Unbridled horse and two elephants with riders, southern section

of the east face of the “Tiger Cave,” Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam (photo by Valérie Gillet).


The segment of the rock this casts as the main shrine is dominated

by leonine forms. Four of these resemble the lion that accompanies the

goddess of battle and carries her into the fray against a buffalo. The other

eleven are what people now call yāḷi or vyāla (fig. 4.2). Some also call them

lions or tigers—both cats are conflated in the Tamil word puli and the

Sanskrit word siṃha—but yāḷi portray nothing you could find in a zoo.

They are composite, fantastic creatures with bulging eyeballs and horns

rising straight from those eyeballs to hook around erect, mouse-like ears.

Many sharp teeth and a pair of particularly long fangs fill their open grins.

The yāḷi and other lion-like figures at the Tiger Cave are distinct but

closely related sculptural types. Both are large felines that tend to pose on

high alert, sinews rippling, eyes popping, and mouths wide open in a kind

of grin that is also a display of long, sharp teeth curved backward to hook

prey. Some lion sculptures of this period have slightly smaller teeth than

yāḷi show and some yāḷi lack the lions’ mane of curls set into a neat grid,

but neither of these features reliably distinguishes yāḷi and lions from each

other. Rather, these features manifest across a broad spectrum of degrees

among surviving Pallava monuments. In doing so, they weave together the

categories of yāḷi and lion. The only features I see distinguishing yāḷi from

lions are their upright horns and the prominent crest between them. These

horns contribute an element of hybrid fantasy, though even the Pallava lions

who lack horns are far from naturalistic in appearance. Their patterned

manes, tight mouths, and rigid bodies mark them off as some more orderly

and preternaturally threatening type of creation.

Location also suggests a close association between yāḷi and lions in

the minds of Pallava designers. They are, as I mentioned, nested together

at the Tiger Cave. The two kinds of creatures also intermingle at the left

margin of the Krṣṇamaṇḍapa tableau. Either creature may serve as the base

component of a pillar or pilaster. The Mahiṣāsuramardinī rock-cut temple

on Māmallapuram Hill combines a pair of yāḷi-based pilasters with a pair

of lion-based pillars in front of its central shrine.

Eleven colossal yāḷi line the ovoid contour of this northern segment

of the mound. From there they turn inward to enfold, almost completely,

a cluster of three alcoves. (I strongly suspect this dramatic arrangement as

the inspiration for the lion-mouthed cave in Walt Disney’s animated movie,


“Aladdin.”)

3

Carving looks to have progressed from the top of their circle to

the bottom, leaving parts of the lowest two yāḷi as partial tracings on the stone.

The creatures’ roiling, organic masses present a counterpoint to the

alcoves’ neat, rectilinear base mouldings, pilaster capitals, corbels, and cornices.

The yāḷi focus their attention on the alcoves and ask viewers to do the same.

Two more leonine pairs emphasize the central alcove which is at least four

times larger than the two roughly symmetrical alcoves on either side of it.

Rearing lions with human riders on their backs emerge against the pilasters

that flank that alcove. On either side of the four steps that lead up to that

alcove are rough outlines for a pair of seated lions, these without riders.

3

M.S. Mate (1970: 115–116) wonders whether this cave has a predecessor in the so-called

Bagh Gumpha in Orissa, but he acknowledges the distance in time and space between

the two carvings makes any direct impact unlikely. I second his caution on this point

and would add that the Orissan creature, with its domical snout and square teeth, is as

likely to reflect a monkey as a lion or tiger.

Fig. 4.5. Beginnings of the carving of a colossal lion, crouchant, with a rectangular

niche cut into its chest, north face of the Tiger Cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(photo by the author).


Around to the right of this elaborate composition, and thus on the

boulder’s north face, are the beginnings of another and even larger lion

head and upper body (fig. 4.5). These are the two lumps that look rather

like a puppy in profile (fig. 4.2). The rectangular recess cut into its chest

recalls a more finished, seated lion carved from the bedrock that supports

the Shore Temple complex (Schmid 2005: figs. 2–3).

4

Yāḷis and The goddess of War

All these leonine forms have led scholars to assume that the large alcove

among the yāḷis was going to feature the goddess often called Koṟṟavai

(Schmid 2005: 464) or Durgā (Lockwood 1993: 177; Sivaramamurti 1978: 33;

4

K.R. Srinivasan (1964: 182) points out this similarity and the beginnings of an oblong

niche below it.

Fig. 4.6. Mahiṣāsuramardinī (the Goddess rides against the buffalo-headed demon,

Mahiṣa), north wall of the Mahiṣāsuramardinī cave, on Māmallapuram hill



K.R. Srinivasan 1964: 180; Longhurst 1928: 46). The first of these names

associates her with the patron deity of war in the Cilappatikāram, a Tamil

epic of the early centuries of the common era; the second name identifies

her as the goddess whom the gods create to destroy a buffalo-headed demon

(asura) called Mahiṣa in the sixth-eighth century Sanskrit hymns called

the Devīmāhātmya. Both concepts could connect to the signs around many

goddesses in Māmallapuram—goddesses who hold weapons of war, fight a

buffalo-headed creature, sit or stand on the decapitated head of a buffalo, or

stand between a pair of kneeling, long-haired, moustachioed warriors hold-

ing knives to cut their own arm, palm, or neck.

Most of these have lions near them. I have already mentioned the

goddess who sits inside a tiny alcove cut into the chest of a stone lion at

the Shore Temple complex. She bears many weapons and sits upon the

decapitated head of a buffalo. One of the grandest tableaux at this site shows

a goddess with many weapons in many arms riding astride a grinning,

Fig. 4.7. The Draupadī Ratha, seen

from the west, with her yāḷi mount in

attendance, at the cluster of monoliths

called the Five Rathas, Māmallapuram


Fig. 4.8. The Goddess standing on a

lotus and receiving bloody offerings from

kneeling warriors, interior of the Draupadī

Ratha, east wall, Māmallapuram



fanged lion as she drives back a buffalo-headed warrior (fig. 4.6). When the

goddess inside the so-called Draupadīratha looks out the doorway of her

shrine, what fills her vision is a lion carved fully in the round, her mount

standing at the ready (fig. 4.7). Inside that ratha, warriors kneel at her feet

and offer her parts of their bodies (fig. 4.8). In similar renderings of this

goddess at the Varāha and Adivarāha caves, a large lion fills the upper left

corner of the relief (figs. 4.9–10). At the Shore Temple itself, a lion is the

only companion of this goddess (Schmid 2005: fig. 5).

Two more examples bear striking resemblances to the Tiger Cave. The

Mahiṣa Rock just north of the Shore Temple complex is a granite hump

on which rearing lion with riders flank a rectangular alcove that faces out

to the sea. The goddess inside this alcove, however, is eight-armed and sits

on a buffalo’s severed head. A lion incised into the north end of the boulder

attacks a buffalo-headed figure.

5

A similar goddess and alcove pierce the chest

of the lion-shaped Durgā Rock just south of the Shore Temple complex.

Two warriors beneath the goddess offer her their blood. A second rock in

front of this one is shaped as a lion. Carved on a third rock is a ring of yāḷi heads enclosing a niche that contains a seated figure with its hands on its

knees. On the back, or west-facing, side of the Durgā Rock is a seated male

figure on an elephant. A horse carved in profile turns toward the elephant.

This spot, in other words, redeploys the same elements we see in Cāḷuvaṉ

Kuppam only slightly rearranged to accommodate the different sizes and

shapes of the available boulders. And it deploys them around a goddess who

sits on a buffalo’s decapitated head, not a goddess lustrated by elephants.

seeing ProsPeriTy

And yet, these precedents notwithstanding, none of the shapes these reliefs

give to the warrior goddess—or for that matter to any other figures I have

seen in the region—align with the inchoate lumps and gouges roughed into

the back wall of the Tiger Cave’s largest alcove. The Gaja-Lakṣmī tableaux

in the Varāha Cave and Adivarāha Cave do (figs. 4.11–12). These are west-

facing shrines cut into the hill in the middle of Māmallapuram.

5

For descriptions and photos of these rocks, see Schmid (2005: 470–471, 506 and fig. 12),

Sivaramamurti (1978: 32), K.R. Srinivasan (1964: 183).


There may have been other compositions, admittedly, that would have

matched just as well and have been lost. It is possible that the Tiger Cave

was designed to hold a unique composition of figures for which no other

versions have survived. But the Pallavas had a strong tendency to repeat

their favourite sculptural subjects and groupings from one monument to

another, each one only a slight variation on the others.

6

The chance of

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam having had a version of the Gaja-Lakṣmī grouping strikes

me as quite high. There were, after all, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam versions of yāḷis, elephants with riders, and the goddess battling a male buffalo—other pieces

of her habitat, as it were.

The mark that first caught my eye is in the Tiger Cave alcove’s upper

left corner (fig. 4.13). Below the deeply excavated surface at the corner

itself, a projecting, horizontal mass flows from left to right dipping slightly

toward the ground before it curves quickly upward, levelling off at the upper

margin of the wall and winding into a circular turn. Compare this to the

upper left corners of figures 4.11 and 4.12 where a similar line defines in

profile an elephant’s forehead and the lifted trunk. That trunk lifts to the

wall’s upper limit and then curls around the spherical vase the elephant

empties over Lakṣmī’s head.

I do acknowledge that these lines are not identical in the Tiger Cave

and the more finished panels. The Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam version would have

left more space between the elephant’s brow and the upper margin of the

relief, a shape more like those of the elephants at the Pallavas’ Kailāsanātha

temple in Kāñcīpuram, their inland capital (fig. 4.14). But no two Pallava

sculptures of any subject are identical with each other, just as no two temples

in the subcontinent are. Each offers some variant on the common theme.

I perceive this unfinished surface in Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam as the start of yet one

more version of the lotus-throned goddess lustrated by elephants.

What I read as the lower edge of the elephant on the left at Cāḷuvaṉ

Kuppam shades rather quickly back into the rock face. The surface then

6

For examples of these repetitions with slight variation, see the essays by Lockwood,

Bhat, Siromoney & Dayanandan (2001) on Somāskandas and Gaṅgādharas (pp. 21–52);

and Francis, Gillet & Schmid (2006) on the persistence of Somāskanda carvings outside

the known urban centres. Gillet (2010) systematically traces each image type across

many the monuments of the Pallava period.


rises again in a second curve that roughly echoes the one above it. So too

in figures 4.11 and 4.12, sculptors have cut the lower part of that elephant’s

form more shallowly than the upper contour, deploying the stone mass

below for two female figures. One of these women holds a spherical pot on

the shoulder nearest the elephant as if to offer it for the next pour. And in

figure 4.11, an extra curve protruding from the stone background sets off

that woman’s tall headdress and echoes the curve of the elephant’s trunk,

suggesting a similar possibility at Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam.

A columnar shaft down the centre of the Tiger Cave alcove’s top half

corresponds to the location of Lakṣmī’s upper body, head, and conical crown

in figures 4.11 and 4.12. The unfinished shaft reaches the top of the alcove

wall, perhaps to provide material from which to carve the emptying pot as

well. Even in the more finished versions of Gaja-Lakṣmī, the rigidity of her

symmetrical posture retains the sense of a column—a female counterpart

perhaps to the columnar posture (samabhaṅga) often used for figures of

Viṣṇu, a god of equipoise who is often cast in the role of Lakṣmī’s husband.

Indeed bilateral symmetry characterizes the entire Gaja-Lakṣmī com-

position in these finished as well as unfinished versions. On either side of the

vertical shaft, bulbous masses dominate the upper corners and a horizontal

bar crosses to left and right, some two-fifths of the way up the wall’s surface.

This bar runs along the level at which the shoulders, breasts, and water

pots of the four standing women are carved in the finished Gaja-Lakṣmī

panels (compare especially fig. 4.11). Just above this bar and on the right

half of this rectangular surface rise two ovoid lumps, side by side. This is

just where the heads of two women appear in figures 4.11 and 4.12. They

stand beneath a second elephant to which the woman on the left offers a

water pot. I suspect those ovoid lumps in the Tiger Cave were to be the

heads of two such figures.

That elephant assumes slightly different angles at the Varāha Cave

(fig. 4.11) and the Adivarāha Cave (fig. 4.12). In both, he wraps the end

of his trunk around the pot a woman holds up. His lower trunk is in

three-quarter profile so that we see both tusks. In figure 4.11, all of the

elephant’s trunk and his head too remain in three-quarter profile whereas

in figure 4.12, the elephant’s forehead and the first swell of his trunk

rotate into the stone matrix and into a strict profile view. The unfinished


Fig. 4.10. The Goddess receiving bloody

offerings from kneeling warriors, interior of the

Ādivarāha Cave, east wall, at the southwest foot

of Māmallapuram hill (photo by Emmanuel Francis)

Fig. 4.11. The Goddess lustrated by two

elephants, interior of the Varāha Cave,

east wall, Māmallapuram hill


Fig. 4.12. The Goddess lustrated by two elephants,

interior of the Ādivarāha Cave, east wall, at the

southwest foot of Māmallapuram hill

(photo by Emmanuel Francis).

Fig. 4.9. The Goddess receiving bloody offer-

ings from kneeling warriors, interior of the

Varāha Cave, east wall, Māmallapuram hill

(photo by Emmanuel Francis)


The voids and volumes inside the Tiger Cave do not align nearly so

well with local sculptures of the goddess of warriors and buffaloes, though

those panels too are rectangular compositions of multiple figures arranged

in a loose bilateral symmetry around a central, columnar protuberance. That

description also fits two other sculptures in Māmallapuram’s Varāha Cave,

tableaux of Viṣṇu in his Varāha and Trivikrama avatāras (see Srinivasan

1964: pls. XLI, XLIV). That common structure could have been the product

of a basic compositional formula, some kind of grid, maṇḍala, yantra, or

other geometrical diagram with which artisans of a given workshop began

such projects. After laying in the central, columnar form, they could work

outward, filling in with various figures and shapes according to the nature

of the central divinity. This pattern of elaborating outward from an inner

core is a fundamental design principle for most Hindu temples.

Groupings around the martial goddess, however, do not hollow out in

the upper left corner. Instead the stone there projects forward in a leonine

head (figs. 4.9–10) or hovering attendants (fig. 4.8). And where a wavy line

swoops down from the upper right corner toward the centre of the unfinished

alcove, panels of the warrior goddess feature the straight lines of a deer’s face

and horns (figs. 4.9–10). Two portly dwarves (gaṇas) occupy that corner of the

Draupadīratha (fig. 4.8). The dwarf closest to the goddess tilts his upper body

relief at Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam looks

to have been headed in the latter

direction. The undulations wind-

ing from the upper right corner

toward the centre of that wall

suggest the domed cranium and

the more emphatic double curve

in the trunk of the simple profile

view. This would also distinguish

the composition from the sym-

metrical version of this subject at

the eighth-century Kailāsanātha

temple in Kāñcīpuram where the

elephants pour in unison rather

than in alternation (fig. 4.14).

Fig. 4.13. Digitally enhanced view of the

marks inside the largest alcove in the east

face of the Tiger Cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(photo by Valérie Gillet; digital

enhancement by Mark Williams).


toward her and thus against the diagonal flow of other lines in this portion

of the unfinished relief. The angular limbs of anthropomorphic attendants

fill that corner in the Viṣṇu reliefs. Nor do the lower halves of any of these

panels accommodate the bar that projects horizontally across the unfinished

relief slightly below its midpoint. Nothing significant occurs at that latitude

in the Viṣṇu panels. The arms of warriors offering parts of their bodies to

the goddess do protrude at that latitude, though to varying degrees from

one relief to the next, and the goddess’s form does not. Her standing legs

stay parallel to the stone background where the seated Lakṣmī’s knees angle

forward—right along a horizontal ridge just below the middle of the panel

and in line with the shoulders of the four female attendants.

Fig. 4.14.

The Goddess

lustrated by

two elephants,

symmetrically posed,

south wall, eastern

alcove, of the vimāna

at the Kailāsanātha

temple, Kāñcīpuram



Yāḷis WiTh ProsPeriTy

The scars in the Tiger Cave’s central alcove thus lead me see the traces of

no other goddess than Lakṣmī lustrated by elephants. What could it have

meant to frame her with yāḷis in Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam? They are not part of

her other representations in the region, so far as I know.

The work of Charlotte Schmid (2005) suggests a solution, or to put

it another way, this rock provides further points of evidence for a brilliant

insight Schmid has proposed. That insight is that the Pallava monuments

of Māmallapuram and Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam consistently portray this goddess of

prosperity and the goddess who receives bloody offerings as aspects of the

same goddess. Schmid demonstrates that the many goddess sculptures at

these sites share a set of interchangeable iconographic markers which weaves

them together into a network (“réseau,” p. 461) or “series” (pp. 491–492).

As the title of Schmid’s article states, the Goddess of Prosperity has a

double aspect. So does the Goddess of Victory. These sculptures give

visual expression to the concept of the feminine divine articulated in the

Devīmāhātmya, a Great Goddess whose many forms converge to express

her ultimate unity and her capacity to reunite polarities such as murder and

birth, death and fecundity, prosperity and suffering (p. 460). That Goddess

is gentle (saumya) and frightening (ghora), and in both she embodies the

same function, that of protection. Schmid (p. 486) finds sculptural expres-

sion of this convergence of saumya and ghora in carvings of the smiling,

armed goddess who receives bloody offerings (fig. 4.10). Schmid also sees

sculptures of this armed goddess and Lakṣmī as “responding to each other

until they weave an iconographic network, constituting in itself, to my

mind, the representation of one multiform divinity” (p. 461, my transla-

tion from her French).

Schmid argues that the Pallavas invoked these goddesses together in

order to make the point—a promise, even—that kingship played a consti-

tutive role in bringing together a life of prosperity and the world of victory

(Schmid 2005: 509–511). She points to a Pallava inscription in which the

king associates victory and prosperity (p. 511).

7

Emmanuel Francis notes

7

“May Śrībhara be victorious for a long time, who (…) bears the earth on his arm

like a coquettish embellishment.” Translation by E. Hultzsch, 1890, No. 18 (at the


that a third repetition of that phrase is in Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam itself, on the

Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara rock-cut temple (personal communication, July 2012).

8

Kings who ruled well ensured prosperity for their kingdom through victory

in wars that collected booty and that protected the people against unjust

kings. As a visual demonstration of this concept, Schmid takes these god-

desses in the Varāha and Adivarāha rock-cut temples, the very sculptures

that have served as the primary objects of comparison in my preceding

arguments (figs. 4.9-12). These sculptures interject the king’s presence

through visual signs. Lakṣmī sits on her lotus with both legs pendant, a

position that was until lately unusual in South Asia and peculiar to kings

on thrones during the abhiṣeka ritual that transformed princes into kings

(pp. 495–497). A key part of that ritual was lustration. Water poured over

the new king’s head purified him and gave him a rebirth into his new

identity as king. Schmid reads the elephants in this composition as rain-

clouds (p. 497), and finds water motifs as emblematic of royal consecration

throughout the carvings in Māmallapuram (Francis, Gillet & Schmid 2005:

586). Surely it is no accident that the pit in front of the Tiger Cave, and thus

at the foot of this alcove, collects a deep pool of water in the rainy season

(fig. 4.2). A rectangular pit across the facade of the Varāha Cave collected

water too. With the theatrical panache that must also have enlivened the

cliff in Māmallapuram carved with the Descent of Gaṅgā, the Tiger Cave

integrated real water into a sculptural composition about water to make the

king’s promise of Śrī irresistibly vivid.

The goddess who fights the buffalo can also serve as emblematic of

the king. She like kings was born of tejas, a confluence of divine energies

(Schmid, 2005, pp. 493–495). War, the ultimate sacrifice to which the

bloody offerings at her feet symbolically allude, links her to the warriors

who make those offerings. Their sacrifice, according to Schmid, symbol-

izes the connection between this goddess and them, and thus between the

goddess and the king who is the paradigmatic warrior.

Implicit within this rich web of identifications between goddesses

and kings, sculpture and text, saumya and ghora, I perceive a further set

Gaṇeśa Temple, Māmallapuram), verse 4, pp. 4–5; No. 19 (at the Dharmarājamaṇḍapa,

Māmallapuram), line 5, p. 6.

8

Hultzsch, 1890, No. 21, line 8, p. 7.


of equations (personal communication with Schmid, July 2012). I suggest

that the Adivarāha and Varāha rock-cut temples deploy and resolve the

saumya/ghora dyad not only within the smiling, graceful figure of the armed

goddess receiving bloody offerings but also through the pairing of Lakṣmī

with the armed goddess. Architectural context pairs them explicitly at both

monuments where together they dominate each cave’s back wall and divide

it between them. In both, the goddess with elephants fills the wall to the

left of the central shrine and the goddess with warriors fills the right. At

the Adivarāha rock-cut temple, moreover, where the central shrine retains

its image of Viṣṇu, these goddesses flank him in much the same way as two

wives flank the Pallava king on an adjacent wall (Srinivasan 1964: pl. LV.A).

Side by side that way, their commonalities emerge with special clar-

ity—their central, columnar forms and the shared symmetries of the figures

around them. Their matched forms and positions in each cave could have

expressed, much as the apparently contradictory elements of the armed

goddess could, these two otherwise different looking goddesses revealed

two sides of the same coin, with an emphasis on the forces that pulled them

together rather than on those that could define them as polarities. The vic-

tory one promises—in the decapitated enemy underfoot—yields prosperity

and thus brings us back to the goddess on the other side of the wall. Kings

are thus emblematized in goddesses of water and goddesses of blood. The

web that weaves those kingly goddesses together can demonstrate that kings

are the force that brings prosperity out of war.

The armed goddess, in this formulation, would embody the inverse of

Lakṣmī, and that can seem problematic as the term “Alakṣmī” has more

commonly been used for the goddess Jyeṣṭhā. Sculptures of Jyeṣṭhā can

look dour and dumpy, and “Alakṣmī” can be translated as “unlucky” or

”bad-fortune,” all of which has collected around her a series of negative

connotations that seem to have little to do with the gorgeous, light-stepping

goddess that warriors surrender to in these rock-cut temples (on Jyeṣṭhā,

see Leslie 1991).

I suggest that the negative valencing of “Alakṣmī” and perhaps of

Jyeṣṭhā herself is an unnecessary and perhaps anachronistic obstacle to

understanding the seventh-century meanings of goddesses in these monu-

ments. Why presume a misogyny that categorizes females as “good” or


“bad” in the same environment that cast Viṣṇu’s destructive acts as well

as his salvific ones as virtuous (see Hatley 2007: 7 and 104; Orr 1999;

Michaels 1996; Apfell Marglin, 1985)? The Devīmāhātmya (4.4) uses “vir-

tuous” (sukrtināṃ) and “evil” (pāpa) to categorize those who interact with

the Goddess, promising Lakṣmī to the former and Alakṣmī to the latter

(Schmid 2005: 485), but Cynthia Humes argues that this text explicitly

rejects such binaries in evaluating the Goddess herself and it does so through

metaphors of gender (Humes 2000). When she brings misfortune to the

wicked, the Goddess herself remains glorious.

Reframing Lakṣmī and Alakṣmī as maṅgala and amaṅgala might help

us shift away from a Manichean binarism by deploying non-oppositional

categories built instead around the encouragement or discouragement of life

in this world.

9

Elements in either category can be good or bad depending

on the circumstance, just as the Goddess appears in different forms for

different circumstances (Schmid 2005: 485). Positive qualities may be easy

to perceive in the maṅgala, such as water, marriage, and kings securely on

their thrones, but that sphere also restricts people to the cycle of birth and

rebirth. The amaṅgala embraces death and sickness but also asceticism with

its attendant freedoms and war with its potential for triumph.

It is these qualities of war, victory, bloodshed, and sacrifice that

appear with such power in the sculptures of the inviolate Goddess in these

rock-cut temples. She could show that and still be beautiful because the

amaṅgala was not evil. Indeed, it was necessary. She embodied everything

about the amaṅgala that the king needed most. Given the complementarity

intrinsic to maṅgala and amaṅgala categories, pairing her with Śrī readily

made the point that prosperity and victory in war were interdependent,

not opposites.

10

I would add that similar strategies for lending visual form to the

resolved paradoxes of female divinity in the Devīmāhātmya looks to have

persisted in sculpture of the Tamil region after the Pallavas fell from

power. Sculptures of the eighth-ninth centuries from the region outside

Māmallapuram blend the signs of Lakṣmī and Alakṣmī/Jyeṣṭhā into a single

9

I have discussed these concepts at greater length (Kaimal 2012: 88–99 and 2005: 63–71).

10

On goddess-groups as expressions since the Mahābhārata of the interdependence of

opposites, see White (2003: 35–49 and 58–63) and Mallmann (1963: 169–176).


figure (Francis, Gillet & Schmid 2006: 466–471), which I find easier to read

as conflation than as confusion. Kāñcīpuram, the city that had been the

Pallava capital, produced around the tenth century a set of at least a dozen

goddess sculptures that combine maṅgala and amaṅgala qualities within

each separate figure and that, when viewed as a set, play out the concepts

of nurture and murder, tranquillity and ferocity, fecundity and asceticism

as an infinite spectrum of possibilities and interdependencies. All of those

options find their home in a unified female divine.

ComPlemenTariTy aT Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

What this could mean for Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam is that the unfinished Tiger

Cave was on its way to collapsing together what the Varāha and Adivarāha

caves made manifest in separate reliefs. Each of those caves connects its

two separate goddess sculptures by placing them in parallel locations and

presenting them in matching formats. The Tiger Cave would have pulled

those two aspects of the goddess into the embrace of a single sculptural

composition. Lions that could carry the goddess to battlefield triumph

were about to enfold and protect her in her form as Prosperity. And at

least during the rainy season, water pooled beneath the circle of yāḷi, as if a remnant of the lustrations within the alcove and perhaps as the fecund

source of all life, even fiery yāḷi.

These elements could, moreover, map neatly onto the king. He was

legible in the enthroned, anointed embodiment of prosperity inside the

alcove as well as the leonine military force guaranteeing that prosperity. He

could also be the anointing elephants, fulfilling his promise to nurture the

kingdom. The elephants on the boulder’s southern extension echoed the

rain clouds in the lustration scene, but with proud riders they could evoke

the battle march and the triumphal procession.

The horse too was a vehicle for asserting territorial hegemony in the

Vedic aśvamedha ritual which many inscriptions claim the Pallavas per-

formed (Schmid 2005:p. 506, n. 65). In that ritual, the horse wandered

freely. Any territory it passed through unchallenged, the king claimed as

his own. Any challenge he met with deadly force and if he prevailed, he

claimed authority there too.


A second sculpture at Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam pairs imageries of prosperity

and war. The goddess of battle is carved on the eastern face of a wide, low

boulder some 250 meters north of the Tiger Cave and directly in front of

the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara rock-cut temple (fig. 4.15). In a crowded scene, her

lion and army of dwarves pursue a buffalo-headed warrior who has turned

to flee with his army. The Goddess strikes a posture somewhere between

lunging and standing as she plants one foot on her lion’s shoulder and the

other on a lotus that rises from the bottom edge of the relief. By combin-

ing the lotus motif with the armed buffalo-killer, this relief internalizes the

connection between prosperity and victory against enemy warriors (Schmid

2005: 472–473). That lotus is, moreover, rare in sculptures of the goddess

in combat and it is prominent in—even emblematic of—sculptures of the

peaceful goddess lustrated by elephants.

11

See for example a seventh-century

11

Rare but not unique. The goddess receiving bloody offerings also stands on a lotus in

the Draupadīratha (Schmid 2005: 472–473).

Fig. 4.15. Mahiṣāsuramardinī (the Goddess rides against the buffalo-headed demon,

Mahiṣa), east face of a boulder in front of the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(photo by Valérie Gillet).


version in Māmallapuram of the battle against the buffalo demon (fig. 4.6).

There the goddess sits astride her lion instead of standing up. Beneath her

dangling foot is not a lotus but a bow drawn by one of her dwarf-soldiers.

My hunch is that this battle relief was an eighth-century response to

the unfinished seventh-century lustration panel, and that this response was

part of a wider intervention in the courtyard immediately surrounding that

relief (fig. 4.16).

12

That intervention erased the markers of a previous deity

and rededicated the site to Śiva. I see as part of that intervention an inscrip-

tion carved into the walls flanking the façade of the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave

cut into the east side of a spine of rock just west of the battle relief.

13

The

hall (maṇḍapa) of the cave is three bays wide and into the back wall of each

bay has been carved a shallow relief of Śiva Somāskanda, the image type in

which Śiva sits beside his wife and son.

14

The Somāskanda panels represent

Śiva as much larger than his wife and they squeeze Viṣṇu and Brahmā in

as attendants, all characteristics of eighth century versions of this subject

(Lockwood et al. 2001: 21–36).

15

The inscription remarks on these images,

making the wish that Paśupati, the daughter of the mountain (Pārvatī) and

Guha rejoice in this cave. The inscription also uses several epithets that

most scholars assign to the Pallava king Narasiṃhavarman II Rājasiṃha

(r. circa 700-728).

16

One of these epithets (Atiraṇacaṇḍa) accounts for the

name (Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara) given in the inscription to the rock-cut structure.”

The fabric of the monument gives several indications that this was not

the hall’s original dedication. The Śiva liṅga inside the central shrine is cut

not from the granite bedrock but from black basalt and could have been

inserted well after the cave’s creation (fig. 4.17). Rituals of liṅga-worship

12

Longhurst (1928: 46–47) too notes that the site suggests two separate phases of

construction.

13

For text and translations of that inscription, see Hultzsch (1890, Nos. 19 & 21, pp. 6–8);

Lockwood et al. (2001: 280–283); K.R. Srinivasan (1964: 128–129).

14

For photos, see Lockwood et al. (2001: 98).

15

Lockwood et al. (2001) wonder if the tassel dangling to the right of Umā’s head might

indicate a date even after Rājasiṃha (pp. 97–99).

16

Nagaswamy (1962); Schmid (2005: 471); Sivaramamurti (1978: 33); K.R. Srinivasan

(1964: 128–130). A recent statistical analysis of names in inscriptions does not convince

me that this inscription belongs to Rājasiṃha’s predecessor Parameśvara I (Lockwood

et al. 2001: 97–108).


Fig. 4.16.

East face of the

Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara

cave and the sunken

courtyard before it,

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam


Fig. 4.17. Doorway into the liṅga shrine in the central bay of the

Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam (photo by Valérie Gillet).


frequently include pouring liquids over them. Purpose-built Śiva shrines

generally accommodate this with a drain (praṇāla) out the north side of

the shrine. Here instead a hole has been cut out of the front wall, at floor

level and just to the outside of the right (north) door jamb (fig. 4.18). This

arrangement has the air of an afterthought, perhaps contemporary with the

inscription or perhaps yet later.

Notches roughed into the frames around the door-guardians indicate

that their headdresses have been recarved to enlarge the coiffure or to erase

non-Śaiva signs (fig. 4.19). The signs of Śaiva affiliation on these figures are

quite shallowly carved and could have been later incisions into previously

dressed stone—the prongs of Śiva’s trident (triśūla) on either side of the

head of the left-hand door guardian, the multiple snake heads that wave

behind his head and wrap onto the inner side of the niche frame, and the axe

rendered as a disc on edge in the headdress of the right-hand door guardian

(fig. 4.17). The stone surface immediately adjacent to the peak of this second

guardian’s coiffure has been scooped out more than the stone around it,

again suggesting recarving and perhaps excisions. Similar alterations were

made to door guardians at monuments in Māmallapuram to change their

affiliation from Vaiṣṇava to Śaiva, under the reign of Rājasiṃha (Dehejia

& Davis 2010: 7–8; Lockwood et al. 2001: 7–20, 92).

Outside this cave and off to one side of the courtyard in front of it

are two broken chunks from a sculpture of another deity that looks to

have been discarded and may once have been part of this rock-cut temple

(fig. 4.20). These show the torso and legs of a male figure standing with

weight placed evenly on both unbent legs. An ornamental swag drops sym-

metrically across his thighs. The fingers of his left hand rest on the outside

of his left hip. These evoke a posture frequently adopted by Viṣṇu figures

during the Pallava period (cf. Francis, Gillet & Schmid 2006: 439, 461).

Clearly Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam was occupied before 700 when worship was

directed to some deity other than Śiva. I see the Tiger Cave as part of that

earlier phase of work there. Schmid (2005) too suspects the Tiger Cave to

be older than the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara inscription (p. 471). The Tiger Cave’s

sculptural style resembles seventh century carving in Māmallapuram. The

closest points of comparison for the marks inside the alcove are in the

Varāha and Adivarāha caves (figs. 4.11–12), and these monuments are widely


attributed to the middle of the seventh century (Lockwood et al. 2001:

112–113; Schmid 2005: 466–469; Srinivasan 1964: 141ff., 166ff.; contra

Hirsh 1987; Nagaswamy 1962). Style marks their sculptural tableaux as

quite distinct from those of the eighth century. A rectilinear grid gently

underpins the dignified postures and the arrangement of figures in those

Māmallapuram lustration scenes, and sets them in contrast with the jagged

rhythms, torqued joints, and rubbery contours of the eighth-century bat-

tle scene (fig. 4.15). An upright ridge down the centre of the Tiger Cave’s

unfinished alcove and a bar just below the alcove’s horizontal centre suggest

Fig. 4.20. Discarded and broken image,

perhaps a Viṣṇu, at the edge of the

courtyard of the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara

cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam


Fig. 4.18. Rough hole cut just outside the right

(north) doorjamb of the liṅga shrine in the

Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam


Fig. 4.19. The author pointing out recutting

in the upper frame around the left (south)

door guardian beside the liṅga shrine in the

Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave, Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

(photo by Lisa N. Owen).


a similar grid there and, moreover, that such a grid was among the first

elements artisans laid out when they began this project (fig. 4.13).

Note too the asymmetry of the elephants in these finished and unfin-

ished lustration scenes, as opposed to the symmetry that organizes them in

eighth-century work (fig. 4.14). Other animals on the Tiger Cave suggest

a seventh century date through the volume of their carving. The elephants

and the large yāḷis protrude roundly from the stone surface, occupying

three-dimensional space with a relaxed air instead of the energetic twists

that flatten eighth-century figures into two-dimensional spaces charged

with the coiled energy of their compressed forms (fig. 4.15). By contrast,

a forthright quality similar to that of the Tiger Cave creatures informs the

carving and the posture of figures in the seventh-century version of that

battle scene in the Mahiṣāsuramardinī cave (fig. 4.6). I find these general

principles for organizing and executing figures more compelling evidence

of dating than the rather automatic standard by which some have assign

the Tiger Cave to the eighth-century: the presence of rearing rather than

seated lions on the pilasters beside the alcove (Sivaramamurti 1978: 33;

Srinivasan 1964: 182).

17

The sequence of work I am suggesting for Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam would

echo what Schmid has traced at Māmallapuram’s Shore Temple complex.

There too Rājasiṃha had a temple constructed for Śiva around and upon

the remnants of seventh-century rock-cut shrines dedicated to goddesses

and Viṣṇu, some of which he had obliterated (Francis, Gillet & Schmid

2005: 587–590; Schmid 2005: 464–466.)

And yet the Tiger Cave seems to have escaped the erasures inflicted on

the three-bayed hall just to its north. It shows no signs of recarving. I am

inclined to read the regular striations in the upper left and across the lower

third of the Tiger Cave’s interior surface as early sketches of creativity feeling

its way rather than as traces of a heavy hand of destruction when I compare

it to other reliefs we know to have been removed. What was a scene of the

warrior goddess in the Rāmānujamaṇḍapa on Mahābalipuram Hill remains

rough only on the portions of the surface that bore figures (fig. 4.21)

17

K.R. Srinivasan, however, also lists the monument as part of the Māmalla period

(circa 630-668) and contemporary with the Adivarāha and Varāha caves in his Table of

Contents.


(Dehejia & Davis 2010: 9–15). What was open ground between those

figures retains the smoother surface of its once-finished state. The alcove

inside the Tiger Cave has no such smooth sections. Its forms present only

their front edges and those are only just coming into being. The background

has not yet emerged at all.

What circumstances could have led eighth-century patrons and arti-

sans to leave intact a pre-existing Tiger Cave only 250 meters away from

their assiduous erasures at the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave? Perhaps they simply

did not see the traces of Lakṣmī and her elephants, and thus remained

untroubled by any jarring sectarian connotations she could have carried.

The numerous yāḷis were legible but they could be left alone as they made

fine companions for their scene of the goddess in battle. They could have

given the rock “cover” from hostilities, marking it as consistent with the

other changes being put into place.

But I prefer to think that renovators read the traces inside that rock as

I have just done and that they left the rest of the Tiger Cave intact because

they shared its conception of continuity between prosperity and battle,

between shadowy Lakṣmī and the Alakṣmī they were carving. I suspect this

because their Alakṣmī repeats and recontextualizes two elements that were

becoming central in the Tiger Cave, the lion and the lotus. The interrupted

Fig. 4.21.

Traces of the Goddess

receiving bloody

offerings from kneeling

warriors, interior of the

Rāmānuja Maṇḍapam,

left (south) wall,

Māmallapuram hill



goddess was to be embedded within a leonine circle, the goddess who did

get carved leans on a single lion. A lotus-borne goddess would have been

the focal point of each composition. The goddess in the Tiger Cave would

have been sitting on a lotus while the buffalo-killer stands on one, the one

point of stillness in her frenetic scene. In the scene of lustration, tranquil-

lity would have surrounded that lotus and emanated outward, ordering

elephants and ladies into symmetrical positions until it reached the jagged

energies of yāḷis surrounding them.

The later relief thus plays those shared key elements to opposite effect

as points of contact mediating across a landscape of apparent contrast. The

scene of combat carved in front of the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave features

surging diagonals, an irregular dispersal of figures, and rubbery figures in

vigorous movement, emphasizing the chaos of battle over which this god-

dess reigns and providing a strong counterpoint to the calm uprights and

horizontals sketched out for large, dreamy figures that seem implicit in the

roughly symmetrical lustration scene.

The relief in front of the Atiraṇacaṇḍeśvara cave thus updates the concept

I see embedded within the unfinished lustration, providing it with a then-

new, eighth-century skin. If these two reliefs had ever coexisted in finished

states, they could have played out those connections and contrasts in a yet

more overt display of complementarity in dialog across a short intervening

stretch of sand. But if, as I suspect, the lustration scene was never completed,

that dialog between the two reliefs could have been available only to those

few who had the time and the light to see Lakṣmī’s traces. I would place the

designers of the Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam battle scene among those few. The dialog

between these two sculptures would have unfolded in their minds and across

the span of half a century that separated the creation of these two reliefs.

ConClusions

It is with several goals in mind that I offer this reading of the lumps and

gouges inside the largest alcove of Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam’s Tiger Cave. One

of these goals is to contribute to the latest round of conversation about

Māmallapuram’s enigmatic and lovely sculptures, a round that has become

particularly vigorous with the participation of Schmid, Francis, and Gillet.


I mean also to take up the increasingly critical engagement with crafted

objects we judge to be unfinished. Unfinished should not be presumed as

some kind of character flaw, a cultural attention deficit. I am grateful to

Parker for urging us to find internal measures of how makers and users

assessed a shrine’s degree of completion. Unfinished need not mean never

finished, as Dehejia and Davis point out. Some items are gone for a reason.

Someone powerful wanted them gone. A close reading of material and

visual form is my first response to this challenge of distinguishing among

erasure, interrupted creativity, and intentional roughness.

Another goal of this essay is to add another point of evidence support-

ing Schmid’s model for reading Pallava goddess imagery not as a binary of

tame Lakṣmī and wild Durgā but as a network of interconnected aspects of

a single female divine whose very contrasts express the unified and funda-

mental truth for which her patrons valued her: though they may seem like

opposites, tranquil prosperity relies upon bloody combat. Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

could have offered viewers as many as three opportunities to perceive that

connection through the bodies of goddesses, once within the lotus-borne

goddess’s battle with the buffalo, once in the yāḷis’ embrace of Lakṣmī, and

once more in a dialog between that dynamic pair of sculptures. I see limited

scope for the last of these since I read the Tiger Cave’s alcove as the product

of interrupted creation rather than systematic destruction. But the battle

scene’s explicit reuse of the lion and the lotus incline me to think its designers

were responding empathetically to the intended subject of the Tiger Cave

which they were able to comprehend. As they formed the new goddess they

were in a dialog with the earlier one, a dialog attenuated by time.

Taking a wider view of the shoreline, I can imagine the Tiger Cave in a

contemporary dialog attenuated only by distance with the Mahiṣa Rock and

the Durgā Rock north and south of the Shore Temple complex just 3 kilo-

metres to the south. Others have already noted how similar their forms are

(Schmid 2005: 470–472; Srinivasan 1964: 183; Longhurst 1928: 45). At each

end of this strand was a humped rock extending north to south, its ocean-

facing side carved into a deep alcove framed by a pair of rampant lion; a boul-

der shaped like a crouching lion with a niche cut into its chest; a regal male

figure enshrined in an alcove and riding an elephant; a horse running loose;

and an alcove ringed by yāḷi heads. Their pairing would create iconographic


opportunities. The differing distribution of elements within each of these

clusters—just like the interchangeable iconographic signs among the area’s

goddess sculptures—could express the interchangeability of those elements

and thus the connective tissue unifying all manifestations of these goddesses.

Like the pairs of door guardians that flank the entrance to each temple

in the Tamil region, these two clusters of sculptures were a matching but

also slightly differentiated dyad made up of similar components distributed

in two subtly distinct arrangements. Perhaps these stone clusters functioned

like door guardians too, framing the eastern entrance to the Pallava kingdom,

a seaport somewhere along a once-joined settlement of Māmallapuram and

Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam. Common subject matter, inscriptions, and even carving

styles and techniques show that these two sites were in close contact during

the Pallava period. Though they have two place names now, they look to

have been one continuous settlement in the seventh and eighth centuries.

I am now curious to return to Māmallapuram and revisit the Durgā

Rock cluster for its ring of yāḷi heads. Could the figure inside that ring be

the beginnings of another lustrated goddess? Perhaps the Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

combination of Lakṣmī and yāḷi was not unique. A second example of that

goddess amidst yāḷi would reinforce the network of goddess imagery Schmid

has traced. It would also place on that spot of beach the same pair of goddess

forms that share the Varāha cave and the Adivarāha cave, permitting the

Durgā Rock cluster to articulate the continuities between these goddesses

and the war and prosperity they signify. What unfolded at Cāḷuvaṉ Kuppam

over several decades, with the introduction of the battle relief, may have

been planned as part of a single project a few kilometres down the beach.

My grandest and simplest goal is to encourage sustained visual engage-

ment with all the visual traces around us. There is almost always more

information to discover than initial glances will reveal. Just keep looking.


aCKnowledgements

My sincere thanks to the organizers of the workshop “The Archaeology

of Bhakti” for inviting me to participate, and Leslie Orr for introducing

me to them. Thanks also to Dan Benton and Timothy Byrnes for enabling

my travel to this site in 2010, and to Colgate University and the American

Institute of Indian Studies for sponsoring my many visits there since 1984.

referenCes

textual sourCes

Devīmāhātmya. Devīmāhātmyam with the Commentary of Nīlāmbarācārya. Ed. by Mukund

Lal Wadekar. Vadodara: Oriental Institute, M.S. University of Baroda (The M.S.

University Oriental Series; 18).

Devīmāhātmya. Coburn, Thomas B. (1991). Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of its Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York.

seCondary literature

Apffel Marglin, Frédérique (1985). Female Sexuality in the Hindu World. In C.

Atkinson, C.H. Buchanan & M. Miles (eds.), Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality (pp. 39–60). Boston: Beacon Press.

Dehejia, Vidya & Richard Davis (2010). Addition, Erasure, and Adaptation: Interventions

in the Rock-Cut Monuments of Māmallapuram. Archives of Asian Art 60, 1–18.

Divakaran, Odile (1984). Durgā, the Great Goddess: Meanings and Forms in the

Early Period. In M. Meister (ed.), Discourses on Śiva (pp. 271–288; figs. 237–257).

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