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The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s4: Nandin

The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s4

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Nandin

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Nandin, Nandīśvara or Adhikāranandin are some of the various names by which Śiva's mount, the ‘bull’, came to be described in epic and Purāṇic texts. When these designations began to be attributed to him, he was conceived more as one of Śiva's attendants than as his mount, and unlike Garuḍa he was usually fully anthropomorphised though hybridity in his representation was not unknown. It has been suggested, in Chapter IV of this book, how the bull was originally the theriomorphic form of Śiva, and how numismatic and literary data appear to support this suggestion (pp. 112, 129). Vṛṣabha was at first the attributive epithet of several of the Vedic divinities including Rudra, but it came to denote Śiva specifically in the post-Vedic age. The idea about the bull being the mount of the god appears to have originated before the first century B.C. or first century A.D.; the coins of Ujjayinī and those of Wema Kadphises, noticed in Chapter IV, prove it (p. 117, Pl. IX, Fig. 14). The process of anthropomorphising the mount began, however, in the early centuries of the Christian era, and that it was an accomplished fact by the Gupta period can be substantiated by Kālidāsa's description of Nandin already noted (supra, p. 261). He is described there as keeping guard over the entrance-door to Śiva's abode at Kailāsa with a golden staff resting against his left fore-arm, and silencing the Gaṇas with a finger of his right hand placed on his mouth (Kumārasambhava, III, 41). A reference to Nandin in the lesser epic is of interest, for it describes him as having the general appearance of a monkey (vānararūpam), but the body of a fierce dark brown short-armed powerful dwarf.¹ This description is evidently based on the concept about him as one of the leaders of the Śivagaṇas who, as has been previously shown, are endowed with faces of various animals in early Indian texts and art.

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¹ Rāmāyaṇa, VIII. 16, 14. Nandī is described in this Sarga (v. 8) as, karāla kṛṣṇapiṅgalaḥ | Vāmano vikaṭo muṇḍī Nandī hrasvabhujo balī. In verse 16 he is called vānararūpa; Rāvaṇa, not allowed by Nandī to proceed to Śiva's abode in Kailāsa, laughs at him, and is cursed in turn by the trident-bearing Nandī, the second Śaṃkara (Dīptam śūlamavaṣṭabhya dvitīyamiva Śaṃkaraḥ).

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Plastic representations of the bull-faced Nandin of the early mediaeval period are not unknown.

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Rao cites three different accounts about the origin of Adhikāranandin from Śiva-mahāpurāṇa, Liṅgapurāṇa and another unnamed text (op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 455-58). No reference is to be found there to his peculiar ungainly appearance, and he is primarily described as a human being having some iconographic traits of Śiva. The Viṣṇudharmottara (Bk. III, Ch. 73, vv. 15-7) describes Nandin as three-eyed, four-armed, wearing a tiger-skin garment, holding a triśūla and a bhindipāla (a kind of javelin) in two of his hands, one of the (front) hands being placed on his head, the other being in the tarjanīmudrā. Another unnamed south-Indian text quoted by Rao characterises him as holding a battle-axe and an antelope (in his back hands), (his front hands) being in the añjalimudrā in the act of bowing to Lord Śiva, his body being besmeared with ashes (this is the Pāśupata practice), (his head) being brightened by crescent moon, Gaṅgā and snail-shell-like jaṭās (Vibhrāṇaṃ paraśum mṛgaṃ karatale Īśapraṇāmāñjaliṃ bhasmoddhūlitapāṇḍuraṃ śasikalā-Gaṅgākaparddojvalam). The male figure usually placed into the entrance-door of many Śiva temples of Southern India corresponds to the second description, and thus, as has been observed by Rao, resembles to some extent Śiva in his Candraśekharamūrti aspect; the difference lies in this that the front hands of the former are folded in obeisance, while those of the latter are in the varada and the abhaya poses. Rao rightly observes that ‘the figure of Adhikāranandin is sometimes mistaken by the less informed persons for that of Śiva’ (ibid., p. 455). But Nandin’s fully theriomorphic (bull) form was never discarded by the devout Śaivas, for every Śaiva shrine in India must have the figure of a bull squatting on a raised pedestal facing the entrance-door of the shrine, inside the main sanctum of which is almost invariably placed the divine emblem, the Śivaliṅga. This explains the Matsyapurāṇa description of Nandin as devavīkṣaṇatatparaḥ, i.e., ‘engaged in looking at the Deva (Śiva)’.

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