One of the many intriguing things about the temples of Khajuraho is the prominence given toVaraha - the boar incarnation of Sri Vishnu.
As is the norm, nearly all the temples here face the rising sun, and many temples dedicated to Shiva have a Nandi, the bull, facing the deity, looking towards the west. At Khajuraho, in front of the 10th century Lakshmana temple stands a shrine dedicated to Varaha. It does not seem big until you climb up a fleet of stone stairs to see the massive, beautifully carved and polished, single-stone sculpture of Varaha that almost looks like a huge piggy bank rendered through flights of imagination.
Mythology is of course a time tested way of communicating an underlying philosophy through engaging stories. This one is no different. The ASI boards at the temple does not tell us anything beyond the estimated timelines of construction. So I thought this sculpture was a one off thing until today when I came across a tweet by William Dalrymple with a Varaha image from Eran in Madhya Pradesh that looks almost exactly like the one in Khajuraho.
Intrigued, I got in touch with a cousin, an archeologist at MSU Baroda, who told me that Varaha was a popular cult in central India during the early phase of the Guptas, around 300 CE. "In fact the largest of these Bhu-Varahas is at the Udayagiri caves near Sanchi, where the 12 feet high rock-cut statue, in an area that has the earliest surviving evidence of Hindu structural temple construction."
Why would the earliest temples give so much importance to an animal form, and that too, a wild boar? What do all those intricate carvings on the boars head and torso signify? Apart from some distant memories of stories I heard from my grandmother, and those that I read in Amar Chitra Katha comics, my bandwidth was rather limited.
These are stories that have survived thousands of years, from one generation to the next. My grandmothers generation is no more but her children have grown up seeped in poetry, and the epics. So when I reached out to my mother I was not surprised to receive at the outset an admonition, a gentle rebuke of a reminder - "How many times have I told you to read the Srimad Bhagavatham? It is a treasure trove of wonderful stories!"
Easier said than done. The Srimad Bhagavatham, or Bhagavata Purana, consists of 12 books (skandhas) with 332 chapters (adhyayas) containing about 18,000 verses... in Sanskrit!
The story of Varaha-avatara is covered in canto 3, chapter 13, and goes something like this:
Four baby-faced nerds of the spiritual world, the elder sons of Brahma called the Sana-Kumaras, once went to visit Vishnu. At the gates of Vaikuntha, the abode of Vishnu, they were stopped by two guards, Jaya and Vijaya, who refused to let them through - the kids just did not look serious enough to deserve a meeting with the boss.
The Kumaras got enraged. They cursed Jaya and Vijaya to be born on earth thrice, as three villains with characteristics of "lust, anger and greed". In the first round, during Satya Yuga, the guards were reborn on earth as asuras named Hiranyakashyapu and Hiranyaksha.
So one of the insolent guards turned into the demon Hiranyasha. While living up a life of lust, greed and anger, he once assaulted Mother Earth (Bhu-devi), and dragged her down into the cosmic ocean. People were distraught, they prayed to Vishnu for help, and this time he took on his third avatar to become a wild boar - the Varaha. Varaha dives into the ocean, and finds Bhu-devi. After this rescue mission, as he swims out of the ocean with the Devi clinging on to his curved tusk, Hiranyaksha tries to stop Varaha. A fight ensues, the villain is killed, and Mother Earth is saved.
As always these mythologies are full of hyperlinks - wheels within wheels, stories within stories, popping up like Matryoshka dolls.
What remain unclear is the reason why the cult of the Varaha is restricted to Central India. There is a place near Thiruvananthapuram called SriVaraham named after a shrine dedicated to the same avatar. But why are there no shrines to this avatara elsewhere?
Also, in terms of iconography, the rest of the picture remains unclear - Why is the goddess of wealth (?) placed at the nostrils? What is that fat snake crawling on the ground? why are there 'thousands of sages' attached to the boar's body?
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REFERENCES & LINKS
* Bhagavata Purana - https://vedabase.io/en/library/sb/
