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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 Ambikā 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.? Or both the boys may stand on either side of their mother while she lovingly places her hand over the head of one.8
: Ambikā may also have four arms; such images, in which Ambikā is conceived of as a goddess rather than as a yakshi 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 Neminātha, the patron Jina of the yakshi.
An image of Ambikā, 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 Ambikā 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 Jacking: for example a stone sculpture of the sixth century from Shahabad district in Bihar and some bronzes of Akotal1 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 ome 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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