The Development of Hindu Iconography c16.46

c16.46

of the local traders through the grace of this god. As the bestower of success he was not only highly venerated by the Hindus, but the Buddhists and Jains also seem to have held him in some respect. The appeal of this god with peculiar iconography even spread outside India, and his images of the mediaeval period have been found in Indo-China, Java and other places. In India itself the sect of the Gāṇapatyas came to have as many as six sub-divisions sometime before the time of Anantānandagiri, the biographer of Śaṃkarācārya. Those belonging to the subsects were the exclusive worshippers of the six different aspects of Gaṇapati, known as Mahā, Haridrā, Svarṇa, Santāna, Navanīta and Unmatta-Ucchiṣṭa. It is a fact, however, that his cult never became of such importance as some of the other major cults, but ‘his worship without reference to any particular sect is practised even now by nearly all Hindus at the beginning of any religious ceremony and on special occasions’ (Bhandarkar, op. cit., p. 150).