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Devată : Udbhava aur Vikasa, 2 vols. ( 1981-82 ), Ramachandra Rao's 'Pratima-kosa, Encyclopaedia of Indian Inconography' 2 vol. ( 1988-91). The above mentioned works mainly provide information about Garuda. They do not, however, discuss Garuda covering, every aspect of it. Some of the above works casually refer information on Gandharvas and Vidyādharas but such information are either scanty or scattered. The notable work in this field has been R. S. Panchamukhi's book entitled, Gandharvas and Kinnaras in Indian Iconography' ( 1951 ). It is a short monograph. In this, Pañchamukhi documented sufficiently the literary and the epigraphical data available on these two semi-divine beings but his study is also not to be considered as completely exhaustive one. For example, the field data by him are insufficient in number. The other major important works are 'Iconography of the Sixteen Jaina Mahavidyas' by U.P. Shah, an article published in the Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Vol. 15 (1947), M. A. Dhaky's article' The Gandharva Figures From Osia and Jagat' published in the Journal of Oriental Institute, Vol. XX, No. 2 ( 1970 ), Jagadish Chandra Jain's article 'Vidyadharas in the Vasudeva Hindi' published in the Journal of the Oriental Institute, M. S. University of Baroda, Vol. 24 ( 1974/75), and S. L. Nagar's 'Composite Deities in Indian Art and Literature' ( 1989 ).
Thus we find that the independent works on Gandharvas and Vidyadharas are reasonably inadequate and insufficient for working out the true perspectives of the said semi-divine beings.
It seems that scholars mostly concentrated their minds exploring the various dimensions of divine being only. In their precious studies they had tried to throw light from different angles the diverse personality of deities like Brahmă, Vişnu, Mahesa, Ganesa, Kärttikeya etc. and their various Śaktis. Same is the case of other pantheons of India. Most of these so-called VyantaraDevatas could not attract the attention from the scholarly world. Though these semi-divine beings were assigned lower rank. These Vyantara Devatās play a very useful role in the identification of a deity. Yakşas and Nagas, attracted the attention of a number of scholars. Therefore, one gets valuable infor-mation about them as compare to rest of the Vyantara-Devatās. The information available about the other are limited and an exhaustive study, both textually and artistically have not been undertaken till date. After going through the
published books and articles mentioned above one finds that many questions Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only
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