The Development of Hindu Iconography c15.9

c15.9

In India, as well as in other ancient countries of the world, the deities were mostly conceived anthropomorphically and represented as mortals in mythology and art. The affinity between the mortals and the immortals lay not merely in this anthropomorphism, but it also lay deeper. When Euhemerus explained the members of the Greek pantheon as ordinary men who had lived and acted in this world in bygone days, he was really giving expression to the very common tendency of the human mind to endow the deities with human emotions and passions. I have drawn the attention of my readers in the second chapter of this book to the *Ṛgvedic* description of the deities as *divo naras*, *nṛpeśas* (‘men of the sky,’ ‘kings of men’), etc; innumerable again, are the myths narrated in the Vedic, Epic and Purāṇic literature where the denizens of the heavens appear like mere men, living their lives of joys and sorrows. In later times in India, from the iconographic and iconometric points of view, this likeness is always present. Leaving aside the theriomorphic or therio-anthropomorphic divinities, even those gods or goddesses endowed with more limbs than are natural, really present cases of exaggerated anthropomorphism. In the proportional heights assigned to different types of divine images in early iconometric texts, we recognise the heights attained by several types of men in India. The Indians from a fairly early period believed in the existence of five different types of men (pañcamanuṣyavibhāga), which might or might not have ethnic bases. These five classes, according to Varāhamihira, are Haṃsa, Śaśa, Rucaka, Bhadra and Mālavya, who are born when the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury and Venus are ascendant respectively.¹ The height as well as the girth of the Haṃsa type of men is laid down by the same author as 96 aṅgulas, the height and girth of the four other classes exceeding by three aṅgulas each from the same of its immediate predecessor (i.e., a Śaśa type of man will be 99 aṅ., a Rucaka—102 aṅ., a Bhadra—105 aṅ. and a Mālavya—108 aṅ.).²