Sambodhi 1980 Vol 09

Author(s): Dalsukh Malvania, H C Bhayani, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 98

A PARAMĀRA SCULPTURE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM: VÄGDEVĪ OR YAKSHI AMBIKĀ ?
Kirit Mankodi*
Around the year 1880 the British Museum in London acquired one inscribed stone sculpture of a goddess that had probably been found from the ruins of Dhar, ancient Dhärä, in Malwal (Fig. 1). The sculpture was described and identified by O. C. Gangoly in a paper in which he also included K. N. Dikshit's reading of the four line inscription on the pedestal. The writing, as indeed the image as a whole, is considerably damaged, still Dikshit could decipher parts of it: the name of a king Bhoja; a reference to his capital city; Samvat 1091 or 1034-35 A. D. as the date of the carving; and the name of the goddess Vägdevi. Bhoja is, of course, the Paramāra king who ruled with Dhara as his capital between circa 1005 and 1055 A. D. An ambitious king who fought numerous wars during his long reign, Bhoja is remembered more for his love of learning and his own scholarship; legend ascribes to him the authorship of eightyfour works on grammar, rhetorics, architecture and other subjects, and the establishment in his capital of a college, the Sarasvatisadaha, where Bhoja himself presided over learned discussion3.
We can well imagine the joy of Dikshit and Gangoly at their exciting decipherment of the inscription; ever since the publication of the paper the British Museum sculpture has been considered as an image of Vagdevi -Sarasvati in fact, the very image installed in his college by Bhoja himself. Bhoja having been regarded in the Indian tradition as perhaps the example of a blend of king and scholar, the man of action who is at the same time the man of erudition, this stately sculpture has acquired a romantic aura that is all its own.
Later scholars have also tried to read the record on the image, but the full text has never been satisfactorily explained; the original assumptions that the word Vägdevi refers to this particular image, and that the goddess was installed by Bhoja, have nowhere been substantiated. If we are not carried away by the occurrence together of the names of Bhoja and Vagdevi-Sarasvatt in the inscription which is as yet only imperfectly understood, there is little in the iconography of the figure to support an identification with Sarasvati; on the contrary, even in the present mutilated
The author is on the staff of the project for Indian Cultural Studies founded by FRANCO-INDIAN PHARMACEUTICALS PRIVATE LIMITED, BOMBAY.