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VAIKUÛÙHA-VIáVARÍPA Vol. II

FELDFORSCHUNGSPROJEKT 1991/92

DFG-AZ.: Ma 1069/3-1

Kennwort : VAIKUÛÙHA-VIáVARÍPA

UBER DIE IKONOGRAPHIE, CHRONOLOGIE UND INTERPRETATION DES ARCHËOLOGISCHEN MATERIALS

SKULPTUREN DES VAIKUÛÙHA - UND VIáVARÍPA-

TYPUS IN REGION 5

(GUJARAT)

EINFUHRUNG

-KURZFASSUNG DER ERSTEN ERGEBNISSE

-LANDKARTEN

D:DFG-Bericht 1992(2)/F:Labels etc.

FELDFORSHUNGSPROJEKT 1991/92

DFG-Az.: Ma 1092/3-2

Kennwort: VIáVARÍPA-VAIKUÛÙHA

Some of the results of the 1991 fieldwork in Gujarat are summarised in the following pages. This is an intermediate report (Zwischenbericht) only.

In the absence of epigraphical evidence from the region, the 5th/6th-century rulers of the northern Gujarat area around the adjacent sculptural centres of Devni Mori and Samalaji on the Mesvo River, and the political boundaries of their rule, have not been positively defined. Schastok¹ suggests that between circa 520 and 550 AD, Samalaji, Dungarpur, and Mandasor formed an art-historically identifiable entity within western Malwa, with the capital city at Mandasor²; on this cultural basis, western Malwa at that time would have consisted of the Mandasor, Dungarpur, Cittaur, Kota, and Sabarkantha Districts on the boundaries of modern Madhya Pradesh. Rajasthan, and Gujarat³ after the decline of Buddhism at Devi Mori, the Huna invasion (circa 510 AD), and the re-establishment of Indian control by Yasodharman Aulikara circa 527-533 AD. It is proposed that the only political power strong enough to have dominated this region during the 6th century after these events was the early Kalacuri dynasty based at Mahismati on the Narmada River⁴, south of Mandasor and Ujjain.

In terms of this theory. Vi¿var£pa sculptures of the Samalaji type (Sculpture 01 in this Report), including that found in Oganaj village (Sculpture 02 in this Report), were products of this cultural zone in the northwestern provinces of the Aulikara/ territories under yasodharman or even earlier; they can be dated as early as AD 530-550. According to information provided by the inhabitants of Oganaj in 1991, the Vi¿var£pa sculpture now installed in the temple there was unearthed in the village fields. Nevertheless it seems unlikely that it was locally made, being entirely of Samalaji style and iconography. It is however possible that at the time of its making, in the 6th century, the sculpture was exported to the Oganaj area, only about 80 kilometres south-west of Samalaji, but even this distance would indicate that the pre-Sola´k¢ Vi¿var£pa cult was of a considerably greater geographical extent than has hitherto been known. If the sculpture was conveyed from Samalaji by boat, on the River Mesvo, it would only have been necessary to transport it some 25 kilometres overland to the west bank of the Sabarmati, where Oganaj stands. The westernmost region of the western Malwa culture-zone might therefore be expanded to incorporate Gujarat downriver from Samalaji at least as far as Ahmedabad, and therefore probably also to the coast at the head of the Gulf of Khambat/Cambay, although Samalaji appears to have remained the production centre for the region.

That the Vi¿var£pa cult centred on Samalaji was also known at a slightly later stage farther to the east is proved by the pillar-relief at Mandasor⁵, showing a multiheaded Vi¿var£pa image of the Samalaji type, which probably dates to the last quarter of the 6th century. The spread of the Vi¿var£pa cult from Samalaji to Oganaj and Mandasor tends to confirm Schastok`s thesis concerning the existence of such a culture-zone, and thereby implies a unified and fairly extensive political power in the region.

The southward contact indicated by the Oganaj Vi¿var£pa would explain the remarkable image (Sculpture 03 in this Report) found at Kathlal in Khe·¡/Kaira. The sculpture was discovered there while digging out the foundations for a new school in the 1920s, not far from the village of Pithai, where sculptures of the 7th century were seen in 1991. This accords with the date I have suggested for the Kathlal Vi¿var£pa (Maxwell Bericht an die DFG vom 30.06.1990: S.61-63), so that a considerable centre of sculptural activity must have existed in this area at that time. It was in the 7th century that the Maitraka dynasty

expanded from Valabhi/Vallabhipur in peninsular Gujarat to the northeast, their military of advance proceeding as far as Ujjain in AD 610⁶. As Oganaj lies directly on this line of advance, the initial Maitraka contact with the Vi¿var£pa cult may well have been made there, and the Kathlal sculpture is therefore quite possibly a 7th-century version of that image, representing an eastward expansion of the cult within the growing Maitraka kingdom. This sculpture is the latest known Vi¿var£pa image of the Samalaji type.

The early Vi¿var£pa cult in Gujarat therefore arose at Samalaji in second quarter of the 6th century under the early Kalacuri dynasty, spread southward and eastward during the same century, and was perpetuated farther to the south-west under the Maitraka dynasty in the 7th century, after which it appears to have died out.

In the late 1930s. Professor M. R. Majumdar conducted "a preliminary study of rare Hindu sculptures in Gujarat", with assistance from the University of Bombay (prior to 1947. Ahmedabad/Amdavad and Kaira/Khe·¡ still formed part of the old the Bombay Province, while Mehsana/Mahesana, on the northern frontier of the Bombay administration, was governed from Baroda/Vadodara). His report, published in the Indian Historical Quarterly⁷ in 1940, concentrated on the Vaiku¸¶ha, Ananta, Trailokya-mohana, and Vi¿var£pa forms of ViÀ¸u which are described in the R£pa-ma¸·ana⁸, a Sanskrit text compiled in Chittor/Cittaud (Rajasthan) in the 15th century, and on twelve sculptures of Sola´k¢ style that he found in Mahesana District, identifying them iconographically on the basis of the text. This article, and some contemporary notices published by Sankalia⁹, constitute virtually all that is known about multiple iconography in Gujarat. Unfortunately, the text of Majumdar's report suggests very strongly that he relied less on fieldwork and first-hand examination of the sculptures to support his findings, than on photographic evidence alongside that of the Sanskrit text. That this kind of research can lead to error is not difficult to demonstrate.

Majumdar does not, for example, identify the locations of several of the twelve images which he illustrates, and his descriptions are inadequate. Moreover, the unconvincing identification of only one of his images as Vaikuntha¹⁰ results from his even less probable suggestion that three images out of his selection of twelve represented "14-armed ViÀ¸u (a form of Ananta)¹¹.

This unsatisfactory state of affairs appeared to me to require closer examination. The primary purposes of the fieldwork undertaken in Gujarat in 1991¹², some fifty years after the work of Majumdar, were to attempt to find at least some of the sculptures mentioned by him, and to search for others, with the objective of tracing their historical and geographical background, understanding their iconographical development, and hence clarifying the peculiarities of the iconographical texts from Western India.

Majumdar regarded the twelve images which he found - all having more than four arms and nine of them having multiple heads - as "abnormal varieties in the forms of ViÀ¸u"¹³, and accounted for this through what he termed the "latitude" permitted to local iconographic schools, deviating from "standard forms" preserved in the silpasastric texts. This statement reflects the common, but erroneous, assumption that the iconographies described in texts of the silpasastra class represent true sculptural practice, all variations of which should be regarded as deviant. In fact, it is clear that the sculptural practice of the ¿ilpin is the reality, and that silpasastric descriptions, though often cast in the form of prescriptions, represent the brahmanical concern with ¿astra, which was written at a considerable remove from the realities of image-making¹⁴.

This divergence between text and image is clearly illustrated by the Sola´k¢-period iconography of Vaiku¸¶ha in Gujarat. The 12th-century Apar¡jitap¤cch¡ and the 15th-century R£pma¸·ana both state that the image of Vaiku¸¶ha has eight arms. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, shows that those few Sola´k¢ sculptures of ViÀ¸u which are inscribed bear the name of Vaiku¸¶ha and that these images are, in fact, fourteen-armed. Majumdar¹⁵ proposed to identify the fourteen-armed sculptures as representing "a form of Ananta". This proposal was made on the following improbable basis: the R£pama¸·ana describes the Ananta form of ViÀ¸u as twelve-armed, but no examples of this type are found in the archaeological material; therefore two more arms must have been added, making fourteen, and hence the fourteen-armed sculptures, of which several examples are known, must be variant forms of Ananta. Majumdar recognised that he had no firm foundation for this suggestion: the only direct explanation he offers is made lightheartedly (a possible relationship between the fourteen hand-held attributes and the fourteen worlds), while indirectly he speaks again of sculptural decadence. None of the inscribed images had come to Majumdar's notice, of course, when he wrote this.

The brahmanical authors of the silpasastric texts, although writing at a time when inscribed images of fourteen-armed Vaiku¸¶ha had been developed in the Sola´k¢ kingdom, yet recorded in their texts an outdated iconography in which Vaiku¸¶ha was said to have eight arms. There can be no doubt that the authors of the Apar¡jitap¤cch¡ and the R£pama¸·ana based their descriptions, not on the then existing iconography of ViÀ¸u, but on an earlier textual tradition, namely that represented by the third Khanda of the Vi¿¸udharmottarapur¡¸a of the 8th or 9th century, which speaks of the Kashmiri type of Vaiku¸¶ha image. It was this conceptual distance between the intellectual reality of the brahman priesthood (recorded in the textual tradition of the sastras) on the one hand, and the practical reality of the guilds of sculptors (represented by the archaeological evidence) on the other, which caused Majumdar, and subsequent art historians¹⁶, to fail to recognise either the revision of Vaiku¸¶ha iconography which is represented by the inscribed fourteen-armed images, or the importance of these new Vaiku¸¶ha icons to the temple cult of the Sola´k¢ kingdom.

In my 1991 fieldwork in Gujarat; I was able to document thirteen sculptures of the Sola´k¢-period Vaiku¸¶ha type, four Vi¿var£pa images of the same period, and three of pre-Sola´k¢ date. Only five of the twelve recorded by Majumdar were found still to be in the northern districts, and one of these could not be documented due to the hostility of the temple priests; but eleven additional examples were found and documented with the assistance of the Gujarat State Archaeological Survey and the Indian Trust for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, of which several are new discoveries, while only four are in museums. Of the six complete fourteen-armed Vaiku¸¶ha icons traced, three were clearly inscribed with this name on the base.

The earliest Sola´k¢ Vaiku¸¶ha image which is still in situ appears on the small ViÀ¸u temple at Sandera (Sculpture 12 in this Report), which Majumdar did not notice in his survey. There can be no serious doubt that the structure and its iconography should be dated to the second quarter of the 11th century, and thus associated with the beginning of the Sola´k¢ rise to political power, when the new kingdom was consolidating its presence in the region around the capital city, Anahilavada.

The early Vaiku¸¶ha image in the external niche of the north wall of the Sandera temple was ultimately derived from the Kashmiri form, with the multiple heads and eight arms, and the deity stands alone, without Garu·a, but accompanied by figures representing weapon-personifications as in Kashmir. Most of the hands and attributes are broken, but sufficient remains to show that the icon held the mace and disk, bow and arrow, and the musala of Sa´karÀa¸a. It is important to notice that the peculiarly Sola´k¢ combined gesture of the two front hands, technically the "yogamudr¡", comprising the vy¡khy¡na- and dhy¡na-mudr¡s, make their appearance even in this early phase.

The transition to the 14-armed form of Vaiku¸¶ha, which would have occurred from the end of the 11th, or the beginning of the 12th century onward, during the expansion of the kingdom under JayasiÆha, is represented by the Harsundal and Valam images (Sculptures 05 and 09 in this Report), of which the Harsundal version is plainly inscribed on the base with the name Vaiku¸¶ha.

It was discovered that, in both these cases, the new Vaiku¸¶ha icon was paired with a 20-armed Vi¿var£pa image. The interior layout of the Valam temple shows that these Vaiku¸¶ha-Vi¿var£pa pairs were placed at the centre of each side-wall of the sanctum inside Sola´k¢ ViÀ¸u temples. This can be confirmed at least in the case of the Valam temple, as the relief carving around the interior sanctum walls is specifically designed for the integration of these two images.

The rise of this dual cult of Vaiku¸¶ha-Vi¿var£pa coincide with the territorial expansion of the Sola´k¢ kingdom; there can be little doubt that it is an expression of political power. That the Vaiku¸¶ha cult itself was thereby elevated through its association with Vi¿var£pa, is indicated by the shift of the icon from the external wall of the sanctum, as at Sandera, to the interior of the sanctum, as at Valam.

Unfortunately the Valam evidence, which alone survives to testify to the rise of the dual cult, does not clearly indicate the exact identity of the main ViÀ¸u image on the altar against the rear sanctum wall; the original icon there has been replaced. In later pairs of this kind, such as the two images found at Mahudi (Sculptures 07 and 08 in this Report), the inscription identifying the 14-armed figure as Vaiku¸¶ha was omitted; presumably as the cult became established, it was no longer considered necessary to affirm the identity of the 14-armed image as the same as that of the old 8-armed icon in a new and aggrandised form.

01. SAMALAJI / SABARKANTHA [pre-Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vi¿var£pa Kalasi chokra ni Ma temple

02. OGANAJ / AHMEDABAD [pre-Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vi¿var£pa Tripuri M¡t¡ temple

03. KATHLAL / KHEÚË [pre-Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vi¿var£pa M. R. Seth High School

00. PITHAI / KHEÚË [pre-Sola´k¢ kingdom]: temple sculptures Saktipitha

04. VADAVI / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha Brahmani M¡t¡ temple

05./06 HARSUNDAL / MAHESANA: [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha + Vi¿var£pa Visat M¡t¡ nu Sthanak

07./08. MAHUDI / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha + Vi¿var£pa Kotyarka temple

00. VIJAPUR / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: ViÀ¸u Var¡ha-Svar£pa temple

09./10. VALAM / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha + Vi¿var£pa K¤À¸a temple

11. GUNJA / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ Kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha Domresar talav

12. SANDERA / MAHESANA [early Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha ViÀ¸u temple / S£rya (áiva) temple

00. SUNAK / MAHESANA [early Sola´k¢ kingdom]: áiva temple Nilakanthesvara temple

13./14. ATAN / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha + Vi¿var£pa Mah¡-LakÀmi temple / Ga´g¡ M¡t¡ temple

15. DETHALI / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha Baroda Museum

16. SIDDHAPUR/ MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Trailokyamohana Baroda Museum

17. VISALA / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Trailokyamohana Baroda Museum

18. BALARËM / MAHESANA [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaikuntha, Baroda Museum

19. SOUTHERN RAJASTHAN [Sola´k¢ kingdom]: Vaiku¸¶ha Bombay PWMWI

The densely shaded area represents the probable maximum extent of the Vaiku¸¶ha and Vi¿var£pa cults in the heartland of the Sola´k¢ kingdom in the 11th century A.D. and subsequently, based on the location of the archaeological evidence. The core of this area is the region to the south and east of the Sola´k¢ capital, Anahilapataka (Patan), in the Mahesana District of northern Gujarat.

The geographical factors defining this concentrated cult centre are the Little Rann of Kacch on the west, the Thar Desert and the southern extent of the Aravalli Mountains (including Mt. Abu) on the north, and the River Sabarmati on the east.

From circa the 12th century onward, the archaeological evidence indicates that there was a marked tendency to combine the worship of the Vaiku¸¶ha and Vi¿var£pa aspects of ViÀ¸u in the shrine-rooms of temples in this area (at Valam, Harsundal, mahudi), There is no known evidence of the exapansion of the combined cult in this form beyond the boundaries of the densely shaded area shown on the map. Related forms of the ViÀ¸u, such as Trailokyamohana, spread southwards into peninsular Gujarat.

Separate Vaiku¸¶ha and Vi¿var£pa images of Sola´k¢ style and iconography are known to the northeast, in the Abu, Udaipur (Ahar), and Dungarpur (Pith) districts of southern Rajasthan. These regions are indicated by the less densely shaded areas on the map. There is no direct evidence so far available for the combined cult of the Sola´k¢s in these regions. But the building of a post-Sola´k¢ ViÀ¸u temple in the Udaipur ViÀ¸u images in the external devakosthas, indicates the continuation of connected cult concepts.

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