Bringing mythology alive!

What is it about central India that inspired the Guptas to create so many iconic depictions of the god Vishnu's incarnations? The incarnations have been depicted in regal style, their size varying from a foot to several feet, their locations dispersed over a couple of hundred kilometers. History has recorded the Gupta Kings Samudragupta and Chandragupta II as being followers of Vaishnavism.

In the process of following their faith, they founded a pattern of religious iconography that lasted centuries beyond the demise of their dynasty. Beginning with the Magadhan Empire, iconography depicting Vishnu spread through India leaving behind an incredible archaeological trail, much of which exists even today.

The stories about the incarnations of Vishnu had their origins in religious texts. The Satapatha Brahmana, to take one example, told the tale of the Vaman incarnation, in which Vishnu appears in the form of a dwarf to solve a dispute between the mythological devas and asuras. The asuras agree to concede land equal to the size of a dwarf and the dwarf, Vaman is made to lie down to take his measure. He grows and grows in size to equal the entire earth which is then passed onto the devas. It is stories like this – told via oral traditions and in epics such as Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (written around 1200 AD) – that grew the legend around the incarnations of Vishnu over time.

And adding a physical and larger-than-life presence to the stories were the rock cuts created in their wake. Foremost among these is the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh’s Lalitpur district where a startlingly clear panel depicts Vishnu lying in the folds of Sheshnag. An hour’s drive through a forest range road of the British era brings a person up close with another awesome sight. This is in on the outskirts of a village called Dudhai where a gigantic 42-feet high Narasimha (half man and half lion) has been carved out of a sheer rock. Embedded into a hill, it has stood for one and a half millennia.

Another depiction that was widely enshrined was that of the Varaha or wild boar. As epics have it, the boar incarnation appeared during the churning of the sea for nectar. When the earth began to sink into the water, it was the boar that saved it. The Varaha has been depicted in various places: standing on two legs in a gaint size at Udaygiri, in smaller form on temple remains at Chandpur and Gyaraspur and again in gigantic form - on four legs this time - at an untouched heritage site at Eran, in MP's Sagar district.

Have you ever come across such an iconic depiction of Vishnu?