A rare, large painting depicting Devi, the Great Goddess, riding on a tiger, her figure containing text from the Devi Mahatmya

Rajasthan, by the artist Chiman Rama, dated 1853

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, USA.

Published
Barbara Rossi, From The Ocean of Painting: India's Popular Paintings 1598 to the Present, Oxford 1998, p. 194, no. 82.
Larson, Pal and Gowen, In Her Image: The Great Goddess in Indian Asia and The Madonna in Christian Culture, Santa Barbara 1980, p. 81, no. 49.

Exhibited
In Her Image: The Great Goddess in Indian Asia and The Madonna in Christian Culture, University of California, Santa Barbara, April 2-May 4, 1980; Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, June 1-August 15, 1980; Montgomery Gallery, Claremont Colleges, Claremont, September 15-November 7, 1980; Amarillo Art Center, Texas, December 10, 1980-January 18, 1981.


This large and striking painting is in the tradition of nakshatras, horoscope diagrams which depicted Hindu religious figures (often Ganesh or Hanuman) filled with text, as here, and astrological diagrams. For examples, see the sale in these rooms, Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 15th April 2010, lot 367; and Christie's New York, Indian and Southeast Asian Art, 21st September 2007, lot 280-283; and Jain examples, Christie's New York, Indian and Southeast Asian Art, 19th September 2001, lot 203.

The Great Goddess is here called Candika, though the name Chamunda (one of her other, many names) also appears. Her husband Siva, as Bhairava, leads the tiger on which she rides. There are also two images of Mahashisura, the Goddess' demon adversary. Solar and lunar symbols are portrayed either side of her head, and the remainder of the painting is filled with numerous religious diagrams (yantra), and in the left and lower margins the thousand names of the Goddess are written in two columns. Her body is filled with the text of the Devi Mahatmya, and that of Bhairava with his mantras.

The Devi Mahatmya, the Gorification of the Great Goddess, is a Sanskrit text of thirteen chapters, embedded within the much larger Markandeya Purana, and dates from around the mid-first millennium AD. The text deals with three major episodes when the Goddess rescued the world from the demons, just as Vishnu did in his avatars, interspersed with hymns addressed to her by the gods. For the first time these elevate the Goddess to the supreme principle of the universe, on a par with Vishnu and Siva. For an analysis of this key text, illustrated with some of the paintings in the first complete Guler illustrated version of 1781, see T. B. Coburn, 'The Threefold Vision of the Devi Mahatmya', in V. Dehejia, Devi the Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art, Washington 1999, pp. 37-57; and Dehejia, op. cit., in general, for the Great Goddess.