The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s3.8

c19.s3.8

The extant images of Garuḍa of the mediaeval period can be broadly divided into two classes,—one that shows him as Viṣṇu's mount, and the other where the bird-man serves as the capital of a column, or is placed in front of a Vaiṣṇava shrine. In both, the mount and emblem of Viṣṇu is depicted as a round-eyed human being with the wings of a bird and a beak-like nose, and sometimes legs with the claws of a bird; he is usually two-armed, his hands being in the añjali pose. On some late mediaeval sculptures of Eastern India, he is endowed with four arms, the back hands supporting the legs of his lord or those of the divine couple, Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇa. As the capital of a column he is sometimes depicted as Janiform, the whole figure (not face alone) being double-sided and facing opposite ways. Such figures are two-armed with the hands in the namaskāra mudrā, the eyes and beak as in the other type described above, usual ornaments, elaborate wings, the legs endowed with the claws of a bird, the hair arranged in single coils standing on end on the head. Such a Garuḍa capital in the collection of the Indian Museum is illustrated here; it is in hornblende schist, and is a mediaeval sculpture of Eastern India (Pl. XXVI, Fig. 3). In the elaborate sculpture depicting Viṣṇu Yogāsana in the collection of the Mathura Museum (D. 37) Garuḍa is shown as a standing human being with just a suggestion of tiny wings behind his back, holding a small snake in his hand (cf. his epithet phaṇiphaṇabhṛt already noted). Vogel could not correctly identify the figure in his description of the relief (M.M.C., p. 102), but there is no doubt that it is a graceful representation of Garuḍa of the early mediaeval period with the least element of hybridity in it. The two images of Garuḍa illustrated by Rao (op. cit., Vol. I, p. 287, Pls. LXXXIV and LXXXV, Fig. 1) are interesting; the first of the two, carved on the front gable of Cave No. III at Badami, shows the mythical bird-man with a flabby belly (cf. the textual description kiñcillambodara) holding in his right hand a big snake and flying in the air. The other image from Palur, Travancore, is a 17th century wooden sculpture, a sort of a ceiling piece used to be hung by means of a chain. It illustrates the mythology of the forcible abduction of Vibhāvasu and Supratīka (the elephant and the tortoise) by Garuḍa, already commented on, for it holds the two in his hands. Two elaborately carved panels in Cave No. IV at Badami represent the theft of the jar of ambrosia by Garuḍa, the episode being elaborately described in the Āstikaparvādhyāya of the Ādiparva of the Mahābhārata.¹