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A Paramāra Sculpture in the British Museum
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of Sarasvati are evocative of ascetic virtue, spiritual learning, music, the chanting of hymns, immortality. A prominent type of the Brahmanical Sarasvati's image, based on a brief description in the Agnipuräna 50.16, has a vīņā, a rosary and a manuscript, the vīņā occupying two hands.14 A variant type adds a fourth attribute, either a kamandalu-pitcher (Vishnudharmottarapurāņa III. 64.2-suggestive of the original riverine being of the goddess) or a nectar jar (Säradātilaka, VIIIth Patala: Bhattasali, table at p. 189). But in neither of these forms does the elephant goad occur. The Jaina conception of Sarasvati is similar to the Brahmanical, the objects in her hands being a rosary, lotus, manuscript and jar (as may be seen in the two identical images from Pallu 15), but here too the goad is absent.
Two features of our sculpture might appear to support the current identification with Sarasvati, namely the goad and the lion mount. The goad indeed is given to Sarasvati in Deccani and south Indian images 16 (perhaps under the influence of Ganesa's iconography). But nowhere in northern India does the goad figure in Sara vati's images, and therefore our sculpture which follows the Mālava style cannot be considered as being of Sarasvati.
The mount of Sarasvati is the goose (hamsa) ; in south India and the Deccan it is sometimes the peacock and in Bengal the ram 17. Haridas Bhattacharyya first suggested that the lion can also be the mount of Sarasvati, and his suggestion has been dutifully repeated by all later scholars who wrote on this goddess of learning. True that author cited texts in which Sarasvati, there synonymous with Durgā, is Śiva's Śakti; her.characteristics are a snow-white complexion, three eyes, the crescent moon, tiger skin garment, serpent ornaments, a trident in her hand and a lion mount ( Bhattacharyya, p. 49 ). But the British Museum image has nothing in common with this synthetic form which has so many attributes of Durgā. Again, Bhattacharyya's assertion loses all its force when we look up the only sculpture cited by him as evidence, namely an early image in the Mathura Museum, for the goddess there has no mount at all, but sits directly on a plain pedestal18. We must, therefore, give up the belief that the lion can occur as the mount of Vāgdevi-Sarasvati, and the sculpture in London cannot on this account be identified with the goddess of learning.
It has already been suggested above that the current identification of our sculpture is based solely on the wrong premise that the word Vägdevi in the epigraph refers to the present sculpture itself. We have also conside red and (hopefully ) disproved the arguments that might be raised, a posteriori, in its favour. On making a fresh study of the inscription, we are
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