La statue de Brār (Kaśmīr) retrouvée

Abstract

In 1896, Alfred Foucher came across a statue on the banks of the Papaharana-Naga at Brar in Kasmir. He recognised it as being of Kasmiri origin but was also intrigued by certain Greek characteristics. The statue then disappeared; it is now in the private collection of Mr. Kaneo Suzuki in Japan. It represents a two-armed, upright female divinity. The base of the statue, on which its vahana probably stood, is damaged as is the right hand of the divinity and the attribute she was holding. Her left hand holds an attribute which Foucher identified as « the horn of plenty ». He compared the goddess to Hariti and then referred to her as Laksmi, the Indian goddess of prosperity and beauty. The horn of plenty has never been an attribute of an Indian divinity. There is no sanskrit term to describe an object such as a « cornucopia ». Nor does it feature in Indian art, although several authors, intrigued by an attribute « that is somewhere in between a lotus and a cornucopia » (Granoff, 1970: 16) which is to be seen on several kasmiri sculptures, nevertheless refer to it as a horn of plenty. The Gandhara representation of this attribute is similar to the naturalist image of a greco-roman cornucopia, but its animal shaped tip is characteristic of the more functional rhyton or drinking horn. Its curved form and zoomorphic head indicate that the kasmiri sculptor probably used a Gandhara statue as a model but as the cornucopia had no symbolic meaning for him, he showed it as the stalk of a full — blown lotus flower and linked it to the purna-ghata, the two Indian symbols par excellence of fertility and plenty. The Nilamata-Purana, relating the mythic origin of Kasmira, tells us how Kasyapa asked the goddesses to settle there in order « to purify the country by the gift of water » (vv. 237- 238). For this reason, springs and rivers in Kasmir, large and small, are personnified by a nada-devata, a female « flowing water » divinity who is venerated as a life-giving goddess who can also purify from sin. The Nilamata identifies them by their vahana. The Brar statue probably represents a river goddess, upright on her vahana and holding the stalk of a full-blown lotus and a purna-ghata. As her vahana is missing, the closest we can come to identifying her now is as one of the major nadi-devata from Kasmir.