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98
Kirit Mankodi
the side of his body while the left holds one end of a damaged rod, the other end resting against the waist. In the top left corner of the stele a flying celestial approaches the goddess with a garland, his counterpart in the opposite corner being totally obliterated.
Every single feature of the sculpture corresponds to the Jaina yakshi Ambika as known from carvings from all over the country. Her iconography may be described in brief: When two-armed, she usually holds a bunch of mangoes in her right hand and supports her younger child on her waist if she is standing and on her lap if seated.7 Or both the boys may stand on either side of their mother while she lovingly places her hand over the head of one.8
Ambika may also have four arms; such images, in which Ambika is conceived of as a goddess rather than as a yakshī or śāsanadevatā, begin to occur from the tenth-eleventh century, and are relatively fewer. In this form the two additional hands may hold a goad and a noose, or the mango bunch is repeated in both these extra hands."
The lion is Ambika's mount; in sculptures he either serves as her seat or occurs by the side of the standing goddess. In the latter case, the older child often straddling the frollicking lion as in our own sculpture, while the smaller child reaches up to snatch a mango.10
In addition to the above, a bough of a mango tree nearly always forms a canopy over her figure. the whole composition being crowned by the Tirthankara Neminatha, the patron Jina of the yakshi.
An image of Ambika, then, is recognisable by a mango bunch, a citron, a goad and a noose in her hands, mango branches crowning her head, a toddler child and an older boy gamboling with a lion. It should not, therefore, be too difficult to recognise Ambika in the British Museum sculpture even though three of her arms are broken. True, the mango boughs and the surmounting Tirthankara are absent, but we can cite a few other images of Ambika where one or both of them are similarly lacking; for example a stone sculpture of the sixth century from Shahabad district in Bihar and some bronzes of Akota11 are without the foliage. The same sculpture from Shahabad, another from Hinglajgarh in Madhya Pradesh, and an eastern Indian bronze in the National Museum are devoid of the Tirthankara figure. 12
As to the current identification with Sarasvati, a comparison with some genuine images of Sarasvati, both Brahmanical and Jaina, from central and western India, fails to bear it out.13 The objects in the hands
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