The New Indian Express ·
Faithline | The bond with nature
It’s Varaha Jayanti this Sunday, celebrating the appearance of Lord Vishnu’s third avatar as the celestial boar. While we tend to concentrate our worship on the Narasimha, Rama and Krishna avatars, we are not known to pay much heed to this particular avatar of the Lord. But our ancestors did, and how.
Two superstar images of the Varaha avatar are beautifully found on either side of the Vindhyas. I mean the Varaha sculpture at the Udayagiri Caves, from the 5th-century Gupta period, close to the Sanchi Stupa in Madhya Pradesh, and at Badami Cave 3 in Karnataka, from the 6th-century Chalukya period. They are two of India's finest rock-cut masterpieces ever, not just as Varaha images. They depict Varaha rescuing Mother Earth, Bhudevi, from the cosmic waters where she had been kidnapped by the demon Hiranyaksha.
At Udayagiri, we get to see the massive statue commissioned by King Chandragupta II. It is a colossal 13-foot-high, open-air rock-cut relief carved into a shallow cliff niche. It features a powerful male body with a wild boar's head, the form called Naravaraha. He steps firmly on a subdued serpent king at the base and lifts Bhudevi gracefully on his broad shoulder. He exudes raw power and might.
