INDIA, MADHYA PRADESH, 10TH-11TH CENTURY

This massive stele, impressively carved with large areas in openwork, portrays the Hindu god, Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles and India’s most beloved deity. It is a paragon of medieval Indian sculpture, capturing the ebullience and dynamism characteristic of Indian art and proudly displaying the artist’s mastery of the material. The elephant-headed god is gracefully represented dancing with one foot raised and hips swayed, belying his rotund physique. His ten outstretched arms are rhythmically arranged around the curves of his body, and his form is flanked by deeply-carved temple columns and mythical beasts sinuously outstretched along the outer edges of the stele.
Ganesha is among the most popular deities in Indian culture. He is recognised as the patron deity of science and the arts, and the god of wisdom. As the Remover of Obstacles, he is often turned to at the beginning of a new venture or task, and many Hindu religious ceremonies begin with an invocation of the god. As the ‘Lord of Beginnings,’ Ganesha is often found at the entrances to large temples, particularly those dedicated to his father Shiva. There are, however, many temples and shrines devoted to the elephant-headed god himself, signifying his all-encompassing importance to Indian culture.
The present work is a particularly dynamic representation of the deity, embracing the tantric idioms of the medieval period. The figure is represented with ten arms radiating around his body and holding various implements. On his raised right knee, he rests his lowest proper right hand and acrobatically balances a tall axe upright by the pommel. Ganesha is typically shown with the parashu, or battle axe, an essential tool to help him cut through any obstacles. In his uppermost proper left hand, he holds a bowl of ladhus, or sweets, both a signifier of his wealth-granting powers, but also a reference to his corpulence and jolly demeanor, and with his middle proper right hand, he pops a ladhu directly into his mouth. His tapering trunk is twisted in a tight spiral towards his middle proper left hand, in which he appears to hold a radish, and the hand behind holds his broken tusk, which according to the Puranas, he used to write the Mahabharata.
The raised right ankle and swayed hips indicate the present figure of Ganesha is depicted in his dancing form. The representation of dance in Indian art immediately evokes images of Shiva Nataraja, the ‘Lord of the Dance,’ in which Shiva destroys the world for its rebirth through his cosmic dance. While images of Ganesha dancing therefore obliquely reference those of his father, it is said Ganesha dances to entertain his parents and exhibit his joyfulness. Below his feet, scurrying about on a vegetal spray, is his vahana, or vehicle, the rat. Apart from the playful imagery of the massive Ganesha riding a tiny rodent, the rat is also a symbol of pestilence and a destroyer of food and crops; Ganesha’s dominance of the rat, therefore, represents his overcoming of obstacles and was particularly resonant in the largely agrarian culture of India.
Despite Ganesha’s popularity, few images compare to the present work in terms of scale and quality of carving. A close comparison can be made to a significantly smaller buff sandstone stele of Dancing Ganesha, dated to the ninth-tenth century, at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (acc. no. MH 1996.3). While the Mount Holyoke example bears eight arms rather than the ten seen in the present work, the figure is flanked by columns topped with shikhara motifs and is surmounted by similar garland-bearing figures. The manner in which the Mount Holyoke Ganesha balances the parashu is alike to the present example, and he is also crowned with a similar diadem. A large buff sandstone relief of Dancing Ganesha dated to the ninth century and similar in size to the Mount Holyoke example, can be found at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (acc. no. 70-45), depicting the deity in a similar pose and stylistic rendering. The simple diadem at the top of the elephant head is similarly represented between both works, as is the ornamentation and treatment of the body.
Very few monumental sandstone representations of Ganesha have been offered for sale at public auction in recent years. An exception is the buff sandstone figure of Dancing Ganesha, formerly in the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf, and sold at Christie’s New York on 22 March 2011, lot 42, for $932,500. The Alsdorf example, at 81.3 cm. high, was considerably smaller than the present example, and was in a somewhat fragmentary state, retaining only the central figure of Ganesha. The treatment of the body, however, is very consistent with the present example, displaying the graceful pose with raised ankle and hand on hip, and the ornamentation of the body is similarly restrained with simple snake-garlands and a low diadem.