The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s4.1

c19.s4.1

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.