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Goddess Pratyangira with Her Right Leg Placed on a Lotus (Granite Stone Carving)

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Coaxing a sculpted form out of stone is never easy, especially when the medium is granite, one of the hardest sculpting mediums, but consequently also the most durable and long lasting.

This carving comes from the temple city of Mahabalipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu, one of a few celebrated centres of stone carving in India. It represents goddess Pratyangira also spelt as Prathyangira.

Pratyangira, though a goddess of Shakti group manifesting eternal energy, the source of entire creation as also the instrument of dissolution, is the South Indian transform of Narasimhi, the consort of Vishnu in his Narasimha incarnation and thus is a goddess in Vaishnava line.

However, as Narasimhi or otherwise, Pratyangira is more often venerated as a manifestation of Kali. Besides her iconographic vision: awful appearance with a lion-like face or rather the entire anatomy conceived on fierce line, prominent cheek-bones and muscles, wide open mouth, horrible fangs, flames of fire rising from back of head; the attributes her image has been conceived with – serpents, flames of fire, bowl and even noose are more akin to Kali’s imagery. The goddess has the seven-hooded serpent Shesha covering her umbrella-like from behind and she has a tall crown over her head.

Broadly, as are carved most of her images, here in this image the form of goddess Pratyangira presents a perfect synthesis of human and animal forms – the face of a lioness, and the rest, the physique of a woman, which symbolizes cosmic unity and balance. The Goddess has been represented as seated with her left leg lying horizontally stretching along the back of her mount lion, and the right, suspending downwards, a posture known in iconographic tradition as lalitasana – a form revealing beauty, resting on a lotus.

The image of the goddess along her mount lion has been installed on a stark rectangular platform The lion, her seat, is a static figure but with a stylised ferocity. It has a typically rounded tail.

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