Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 67-68; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691602
ISSN2327-9621
Autores Tópico(s)Martial Arts: Techniques, Psychology, and Education
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeOld fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combatPushkar SohoniPushkar SohoniPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor over a millennium in South Asia, the visual trope of a triumphant lion vanquishing one or several elephants has been common in architectural sculpture, both in the round and in relief (figs. 1–2). In the rather limited scholarship on this motif, diverse interpretations have been offered. Although its presence has remained fairly stable through time, there exist many minor variations on this motif, including the use of leonine creatures variously described as vyālas or yālīs, and the incorporation of other fantastic creatures known popularly as makaras in such combats.1 In South India, the myth of the fantastic composite animal called the Śarabha takes this imagery yet further. Yet, the simple image of a lion victorious over one or more elephants was situated very strategically within certain architectural programs for given periods and places. For example, Deccani forts constructed between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries carried this representation on their barbicans and gateways (fig. 3). While tracing the history of this visual motif, this essay will demonstrate that some stable forms can also be notorious bearers of different and shifting meanings.Figure 1. Rampant lion over a vanquished elephant, eleventh or twelfth century, façade of the Indra Sabha Cave (cave 32), Jaina caves at Ellora, Maharashtra. Photo: author.Figure 2. Three triumphant lions dominating three elephants, eleventh century, base of a column at the Rajarani temple, Bhubaneshwar, Odisha. Photo: author.Figure 3. Lion overpowering several elephants, Deccan sultanates, sixteenth or seventeenth century, entrance gateway of the Fort of Janjira off the coast of Maharashtra. Photo: author.LionsLions have long held a prominent place in Indic culture, appearing in literature and the visual arts. In the middle of the first millennium BCE, the lion had appeared in relation to the god Nārāyaṇa (not yet associated with Viṣṇu) in the Taittiriya Āraṇyaka.2 In the Purāṇas (sacred texts of Hindu mythology composed in the Common Era), Viṣṇu appeared in one of his avatāras as the man-lion Narasimha in several texts.3 Śiva was compared to the lion in the Śiva Purāṇa, and the lion served as the goddess Durgā’s mount in the Śiva Purāṇa and the Devīmahātmya.4The earliest extant visual depictions of lions in South Asia are found on Mauryan columns, such as the famous Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath (ca. 250 BCE).5 The hunting of lions—animals which some scholars believe were introduced to South Asia from western Asia for royal hunts—became a marker of royal prowess during the period of Achaemenid contact with ruling dynasties in South Asia.6 The bas-reliefs in neo-Assyrian royal palaces regularly depicted the king hunting lions,7 and the presence of game reserves attached to palaces at Nineveh and elsewhere testify to the verisimilitude of such representations.8 When the Mauryan emperor Aśoka (ca. 304–232 BCE) embraced Buddhism and began to emphasize nonviolence, the lion became an emblem of royal strength rather than a symbolic object of royal domination. As Romila Thapar has pointed out, Indian dynasties like the Mauryans thus reformulated the motifs and ideas of the Achaemenids (and later the Seleucids), adapting them to their own culture.9 Lions were also depicted as guardians in Buddhist architecture at the sites of Amravati and Karle (ca. 200–100 BCE), both in the Deccan. In early Buddhist architecture, the lion, along with the horse, the elephant, and the zebu, were considered auspicious. All these animals appeared as a standard quartet on many Mauryan pillars.10The image of the lion as an animal hunted by a king, and also as a personification of royal power itself, was consolidated under the Gupta dynasty. Though there are occasional examples of lion hunts of earlier date, such as a Shunga-period sculpture at Sanchi (second century BCE), it was under the Gupta dynasty that the lion and the sun became prominent symbols of royalty. Chandragupta II (r. ca. 375–414 CE) issued gold coins that depicted him hunting a lion and bore the legend Simhavikrama, which can be translated as “valorous among lions.” As his royal title was Vikramaditya (literally “the valorous sun”), several congruous representations of royalty (both literary and visual) were conflated: poets and artists often compared the sun, with its halo of flares, with the form of a golden lion with its mane. The contemporaneous Sasanians, with whom the Guptas had contact, valorized the lion hunt as a marker of kingship and power, and their coins and metalware regularly depicted such hunts.11 The hunting pose of Chandragupta II, which shows the archer’s body turned backward as he shoots an arrow, clearly mimics Sasanian iconography of royal hunts. In literary and visual representations in the early first millennium CE, the “lion-seat” (siṃhāsana) became an emblem for a royal throne, as in the epic of the Mahābhārata.12After the Guptas, the Pallavas continued to use the lion as a symbol of royal power. The Pallava dynasty was revived under the king Simhaviṣṇu, whose name meant “lion-Viṣṇu” (r. ca. 555–590 CE). From the eighth century onward his successors—particularly Narasimhavarman II, also known as Rajasimha, or “royal lion” (r. ca. 700–728 CE)—patronized cave temples that deployed lions as column supports, brackets for cornices, and decorative elements. By the tenth century in eastern India, under the Pala dynasty, the lion came to denote spiritual as well as royal power, as evidenced by its use on throne supports for the Buddha. And by the eleventh century, the lion in combat with a warrior was a common enough trope for royalty that the image of the first Hoysala king Śāla slaying a lion became the so-called “Hoysala emblem” in South India and the Deccan. At every Hoysala temple, a sculpture of a warrior slaying a lion can be found, typically on the śukanāsa (the porch above the frontal projection of a temple).13Hybrid creatures with leonine features also appear on sculpted panels at temples. These imaginary beasts tend to have feline bodies with some combination of heads, limbs, and tails from other animals. It is worth mentioning that these animals occasionally replace or supplement lions in combat with elephants (fig. 4). These leonine hybrid creatures, known as vyālas, are the subject of a monograph by the noted art historian Madhusudan Dhaky. Dhaky proposed that the hybrid and fanciful nature of these creatures was a result of the importation of griffinesque beasts from western Asia, the presumed absence of lions in South India, or a combination of these factors.14Figure 4. Composite mythical leonine creature (vyāla/yālī) fighting an elephant, thirteenth century, Sun Temple at Konark, Odisha. Photo: author.ElephantsIn the second millennium BCE, Indra was often associated with an elephant, as he was the king of the Vedic gods and the elephant was understood as a royal mount. The elephant also accompanied Indra in his capacity as the god of rain, where it appears as a large grey cloud, and as the god of war, where it serves as a war machine.15 The elephant was also an important signifier in Buddhism. According to the story of the Buddha’s birth, his mother dreamed of a white elephant entering her womb through her side. The elephant eventually became a symbol for the Buddha himself. The earliest extant representations of elephants in Asia are in the Buddhist narrative scenes sculpted at Bharhut (ca. 200 BCE), depicting the birth of the Buddha. The major Buddhist sites of Sarnath, Amravati, Sanchi, and Ajanta all have representations of the Buddha as an elephant in that narrative. The elephant also came to symbolize evil power in Buddhist lore, beginning with the story of Devadatta sending the elephant Nalagirī to kill the Buddha.16 That elephant was subsequently subdued by the Buddha and became a symbol of untamed natural power in medieval Sanskrit literature from the first millennium onward. Temple Hinduism (the phase of the religion when temples became the location of worship, beginning sometime in the fifth century CE) and the Purāṇas valorized elephants due to their association with the three major deities: Śiva slew an elephant and wore its skin; Viṣṇu freed a trapped elephant; and the goddess Lakśmi was often depicted with two elephants in attendance showering good fortune upon her. The typology of a goddess with flanking elephants appeared as early as ca. 200 BCE, in a relief carving at Sanchi. In the later Puranas, the elephant-headed god Gaṇeśa was created by Śiva after he beheaded Parvati’s attendant, not having recognized him as his own son; Śiva resuscitated him by affixing an elephant’s head to his body, thus establishing the elephant firmly in the Hindu pantheon.In the visual arts, a pair of elephants flanking a door, gateway, or portal came to be associated with power and prestige, and can be seen very early at the Pitalkhora caves (ca. 200–100 BCE) in the western Deccan. Through the period of Buddhist presence in South Asia, elephants were first treated as symbols for the Buddha, and later as emblems of royal power.17 Beyond its divine associations, the elephant became a marker of royalty, and by the sixteenth century the Mughals used elephants to flank the entrances to their palaces, as can be seen at Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, and Delhi. As Ebba Koch has argued, the practice of carving life-size elephants in the round was taken up by Akbar (1542–1605 CE) and Jahangir (1569–1627 CE) as a way of demonstrating imperial control over nature.18 Babur (1483–1530 CE), the earliest sovereign of the Mughal dynasty, had admired the lifelike sculptures of elephants at the fort of Gwalior when he captured it, and the practice of installing them at the entrances to palaces continued under his successors.19Lions and elephants in combatBattles between lions and elephants were a standard theme in the decoration of most medieval Hindu and Jaina temples in South Asia after the seventh century. Combating elephants and lions of the same size form a band around the base of the Kailasa temple at Ellora in western India (ca. 750–75 CE), built under the Rashtrakutas (fig. 5). Occasionally, vyālas (leonine hybrids) also appear in this band. Many stelae dating between the eighth and twelfth centuries show Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist, or Jaina deities flanked by elephant-lion duels. This is particularly common in sculpture from eastern India (fig. 6).20Figure 5. Elephant and lion in combat, ca. 750–775, basement band of the Kailasa temple (cave 16), Hindu caves at Ellora, Maharashtra. Photo: author.Figure 6. Detail from a sculpture of the Hindu god Kartikeya with a lion vanquishing an elephant, Pala dynasty, twelfth century, Bengal. Chlorite. Indian Museum, Kolkata. Photo: author.Literary representations of the same theme, in which the lion is usually victorious, are also common. The Mahābhārata, in its “core” recension (dated as early as 150 BCE by Alf Hiltebeitel and very conservatively to no later than the fourth century CE in its complete redacted form), frequently alludes to the trope of the lion defeating an elephant as a metaphor for military valor.21 Heroes are often compared with lions, and their prowess over actual elephants in battle is a common theme.22 Another early literary example is from the fifth-century Kumārasambhava by Kalidasa, a Sanskrit writer contemporary with Chandragupta II:Though the prints marked out in blood are washed awayby the melting snow, mountain hunters still can followthe tracks of lions who have struck down elephantsthrough the pearls that fall from the hollows between claws.23Several other poets, such as Bharavi, who was active just a few generations later in the sixth century CE, mentioned lions and elephants as metaphorical enemies. In the Kirātārjunīya, Bharavi describes how the lion “springs at thundering clouds,” thinking them to be elephants.24The motif of the lion and elephant in combat was widespread across the entire subcontinent by the ninth century CE. New terms, such as gajasimha (“elephant [and] lion”), were designated for depictions of this combat.25 The term gajasimha vyāla eventually came to refer to a hybrid with a lion’s body and an elephant’s head. The literary trope of the triumphant lion overcoming the elephant was also common in the sandeśa poetry in Sinhala (the language of Sri Lanka). For example, in the Mayura Sandeśa:Laksmi is always enticed to rest upon his chest,A lion to his enemies, he doesn’t spare the foreheads of elephants,He’s made wealth attainable, heaping it up across Lanka,May that highest of kings, the strong-armed Bhuvanekabāhu, be victorious in this city!26In Sanskrit literature, the word śārdūla was used for the lion as well as a whole host of hybrid, primarily leonine, beasts.27 Śārdūla is additionally the name of a poetic meter in Sanskrit, and therefore the image of the lion as a śārdūla was considered an embodiment of meter and rhythm.28 Human riders commonly appear on the śārdūla and the vyāla rampant over an elephant, as in the temples at Mahabalipuram in South India (seventh century CE). Since they are found from the seventh to the twentieth centuries in most regions of India, and in every style of sculpture, a study of all the motifs and variations of this leo-pachyderm theme deserves separate treatment, far beyond the scope of this essay.In addition to South Asian religious architecture, the lion and elephant combat also appeared on forts and palaces of the sultanates of the Deccan. By this period, the motif had acquired a talismanic function, and all forts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries bore it, usually on important bastions and entrance gates.29 Irrespective of the sectarian affiliation of the rulers, the motif consistently bears the same elements: a single lion vanquishing elephants varying in number from one to six. Small metal objects such as weights sometimes carried this motif (fig. 7), as did large weapons, suggesting the talismanic quality attributed to it. The Malik-i-Maidan cannon, the largest in India when it was cast in the sixteenth century, also had a rendition of this motif (fig. 8). The swell of the cannon’s muzzle was carved to appear like the head of a lion crushing an elephant in its jaws. Each of the forts of the Deccan retains at least one extant relief panel of the lion-elephant duel, wherein the lion is always shown victorious, irrespective of the communal or sectarian identity of the patrons (fig. 9). Shias, Sunnis, Deccanis, Siddis, and Marathas all used this imagery for its magical quality, the precise meaning of which is unknown, but was certainly connected with royal conquest and invincibility.Figure 7. Metal object that has been identified as a weight composed of a lion grappling with five elephants with its legs and tail, sixteenth century, Deccan. Photo: courtesy Ranros Universal SA, British Virgin Islands.Figure 8. Malik-i-Maidan cannon, cast in Ahmadnagar, ca. 1550–65, Bijapur Fort, Karnataka. Photo: author.Figure 9. Lion vanquishing elephants, ca. 1500–1625, entrance gate, Fort of Daulatabad, Maharashtra. Photo: author.Between metaphor and motif: Reading images and envisioning textsScholars have offered multiple interpretations of the lion and elephant in combat. Some have read the motif as a literal representation of social history: one scholar attributed its prevalence to the popularity of animal combats as public entertainment in medieval Rajasthan, but this is an overly simplistic reading.30 Though most treatments of the motif in studies on architecture and art have been merely descriptive, there have been some attempts to uncover deeper meanings. These studies usually refer to texts from very different periods to bolster a singular meaning; for example, Kramrisch’s magnum opus, The Hindu Temple, offers evocative readings of one iteration of the motif that depicted lions on the head of an elephant.31 She cites an eighth- or ninth-century inscription referring to the lion releasing “brilliant pearls” (referring to blood or perhaps the secretion released during the rutting season) from the “storehouse of darkness” that is the elephant, and similar imagery from poetic and epigraphic sources.32Giovanni Verardi has suggested that the lion represented the Brahmanical forces of medieval India. The Mimāṃsa philosopher Kumārila Bhatta (fl. ca. 700 CE), who argued against Buddhist and Jaina philosophical positions, was known by the moniker of Simhanāda (“lion’s roar”).33 Verardi has demonstrated that Buddhists of the period were mocked by being called elephants, perhaps an allusion to the use of an elephant as the symbol of the Buddha, or because of the story of his birth in which an elephant features prominently.34 He cited several sources, including the Sankara Digvijaya, which states that “when the elephants of Jaina and Buddhist heretics disappeared because of the roaming lion of Kumarila, the tree of Vedic wisdom began to spread everywhere with luxuriant foliage.”35 Verardi also mentions several Brahmanical and Jaina inscriptions from Karnataka where the Buddhists are explicitly referred to as elephants.36 He argues for the lions symbolizing Śiva and the trampling elephants representing Buddhists in several relief sculptures at South Indian temple sites patronized by the Pallavas, such as the Talagirisvara Temple in Panamalai (early eighth century CE) and the Vaikuntha Perumal in Kanchi (late eighth century CE).37 In addition to the eighth-century Kailasa temple at Ellora (fig. 5), this motif is also seen in the thirteenth-century Konark Sun Temple in Odisha (formerly Orissa, eastern India; fig. 10). While Verardi makes a case for a particular reading of lions and elephants representing Brahmanical and Buddhist faiths, respectively, he also recognizes the “semantic ambiguity of figurative art,” questioning if the elephants might simply represent vanquished political foes.38 After all, lions have been depicted as powerful beasts faithful to the Buddha and often supporting his throne, particularly in sculptures from Gandhara (first to the fourth century CE).39 In contrast, the Rajasimhesvara temple in the Kailasanathar precinct of Kanchi bears an inscription describing the aforementioned Pallava king Narasimhavarman II as “that pious king of kings … who proved a royal lion (Rajasimha) to the dense troops of the elephants of his daring foes!”40 His nickname, Rajasimha (“royal lion”), would eventually characterize various ruling families who claimed warrior lineages by adopting names such as Singh, Sinha, or Simha. Verardi was convinced that the meaning of the lion and the elephant symbolized the “opposition between the victorious orthodox kings (the lions) and the defeated Buddhists (the elephants).”41 Yet, in Sanskrit literature, the lion as the king of beasts was regularly employed as a metaphor for kings of men, as Daniel H. H. Ingalls showed in his translation of the Subhāṣitaratnakośa by the Buddhist scholar Vidyākara (ca. 1050–1130).42 In this Buddhist work, just and wise kings are likened to lions, full of valor and virtue. This metaphor of a just king as a lion was common in the literary tradition, irrespective of the king’s faith. It was, for instance, used in the eulogies of Buddhist kings in Sri Lanka, therefore indicating that Verardi’s sectarian interpretation of Hindu lions against Buddhist elephants does not always carry merit.Figure 10. Lion triumphant over an elephant who has subdued a human, thirteenth century, Sun Temple at Konark, Odisha. Photo: William Henry Cornish, 1890, © British Library Board, Photo 1003/354.Other scholars of medieval and early modern South Asia have interpreted the lion-elephant combat motif as an allegory of particular ruling dynasties, but these readings depend on perceived correspondences between dynasty and animal that are often fallacious. For example, the victorious feline at the temple at Konark (thirteenth century CE) has erroneously been interpreted as a symbol of the Kesari dynasty.43 However, the temple was built by the Eastern Gangas, who came to power after the Kesaris, and the royal emblem of the Gangas was the elephant. If these sculptures were vestigial imagery from the Kesari dynasty that the Gangas chose to retain, then the meaning of the motif would be understood differently. It was not uncommon for successive royal lineages to maintain and patronize the same imagery, thus disproving the assumption of a simple correspondence between beast and dynasty.In the world of the Bahmani and post-Bahmani sultanates of the late medieval Deccan (1347–1565), the lion-elephant combat took on a slightly different form. The scale was often distorted, with the elephants appearing as miniature creatures gripped by the claws of the lion. The motif persisted as a marker of protection and a symbol of sovereign kingship for another few hundred years, until the consolidation of Mughal power in the Deccan in the late seventeenth century. The early Marathas in the early seventeenth century were the last to use the image of the lion vanquishing elephants on their palaces and forts; after them it completely disappeared. The early Maratha kingdom under Śivājī Bhonsle (1630–80 CE) had retained the court culture of the late sultanates, his ancestors on both sides having served for generations at the court of the Nizam Shahi dynasty (1490–1636). It is therefore no surprise that the lion-elephant motif appears on the gateway at Raigad, the fort that Śivājī built as his new capital and where he had a grand coronation ceremony for himself in 1674 (fig. 11). He also commissioned a poem called the Śivabhārata (also known as the Suryavamśa Anupurāṇa), which invoked the metaphor of the lion vanquishing the elephant. As a mahākāvya (a type of epic poem) imitative of Kalidasa’s Raghuvamśa, it is not surprising that the Śivabhārata employed a classical meter as well as metaphors from older Sanskrit poetry.44 In this context, the use of the pachydermatous allegory for Śivājī’s enemies was only an imitation of earlier Sanskrit usages. Gijs Kruijtzer has detailed the numerous times in the poem that elephant metaphors were used for enemies, in opposition to Śivājī and his father, Shahaji, who are repeatedly likened to lions.45 For example, the confrontation of Śivājī with Afzal Khan was portrayed thus:The enemy Afzal saw that hero [Śivājī]As he came down the mountain,Taking the quick steps of a lionTo stand there before him.His [Śivājī’s] beard was beautiful and longAnd pointed like the tipOf an elephant goad;He was formidable and resolute.46Kruijtzer contends that the text and image work hand in glove—that the poem and the relief sculpture at Raigad are manifestations of the same idea in different media. But we do not have any literary representations in Sanskrit, Marathi, Deccani, or Persian from the preceding two hundred years, when the sculpted motif of lions conquering elephants was common throughout the Deccan. Thus, it is probable that the literary and the visual motifs in the sultanate and Maratha periods were divergent, each with its own life and history, even as they described the same imagery.Figure 11. Lion vanquishing elephants, ca. 1670, main gateway to Raigad Fort, Western Ghats, Maharashtra. Photo: author.* * *Scholars of Indian art and architecture have often relied on the literary tradition in their interpretation of visual motifs, the meanings of which were thought to be contained within literature.47 The implied assumption is that literature was prescriptive of plastic forms of art, and that the literary meaning was thus primary. In the case of the lion-elephant combat, the motif continued a life of its own, with different temporal and regional contexts investing it with different meanings. The lion was associated with virtue and morality from an early period and was certainly associated with royal power from early in the first millennium of the Common Era. In the Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravī, we see that the moral and royal power of the lion is embodied in the Pandava king Yudhisthira, also known for his righteousness, whose name means “steady in war.” He is contrasted with his enemies, the elephants, who represent unrefined and untamed power.48 But images of lions and elephants were not in themselves signifiers of singular meanings; multiple meanings were projected upon them.49The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce helps elucidate the representation of the elephant and lion in combat. For Peirce, semiotic meaning depends upon three factors: the object (signified), the sign or representamen (signifier), and the interpretant (an individual’s interpretation of and/or reaction to the relationship between the object and sign).50 Peirce therefore had three elements in his semiotic system, in contrast to Ferdinand de Saussure’s dualistic model of signifier/signified. The representation of the lion-elephant duel is thus a signifier according to Saussurean semiotics, and a representamen (or sign) according to Peirce.51 The various meanings attributed to the motif across time would be different interpretants, according to Peirce’s scheme. Perhaps it is not pertinent to obsess over what constitutes the true meaning of these representations, which is elusive. For at least two millennia, the elephant-lion duel has served as a signifier of royal power, perhaps with completely different interpretants (as per Peirce), such as military prowess or moral facility. The two interesting, and not unconnected, features of the sign of lions triumphant over elephants are that the form remained relatively stable for a very long period of time, and that it was expressed with adequate creativity to accommodate all the meanings that were layered onto it across different periods and regions.The visual and literary representations of the lion fighting the elephant were two distinct manifestations of the same theme, with their own histories of transmission. The literary history of this metaphor begins in the early first millennium, whereas the plastic expression of the motif is not seen until the middle of the millennium, most likely deriving from the former. But the metaphor and the motif evolved independently of each other, with different significations. Very unusually, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the metaphor and the motif converged upon the same event with the coronation of Śivājī. Even if they eventually converge upon the same meanings of military prowess and royal power, their ontological status, their ceremonial placement, and their modes of deployment are completely independent. The literary lion and elephant are not the same as their sculptural representations; the visual images have weathered much better and continue to attract new meanings, displaying the anxieties of every period in which they are received. While a given motif can appear in both literary and visual culture, it does not necessarily follow that it has the same significance in its literary and visual manifestations. To the contrary, literature and the visual arts have distinct histories that endow a given motif with specific meanings in different periods and places. Texts can be used to clarify visual forms, but only if the text is from the same time and place as the image. Notes 1. M. A. Dhaky, The Vyala Figures on the Mediaeval Temples of India (Varanasi, 1965), focuses entirely on the hybrid creatures whose bodies are arguably leonine, though their heads and tails might be composite, drawing on other animals. As Dhaky argued, “there were a number of specific varieties of vyalas conjured up by a skillful hypostasis” (16), but it is clear that the dominant archetypal form was based on a lion.2. R. Mitra, ed., The Taittiriya Aranyaka of the Black Yajur Veda(Osnabrück, 1982). The Āraṇyakas are philosophical treatises that offer explanations of the ritual sacrifices of the Vedas.3. See P. Granoff, “Saving the Saviour: Śiva and the Vaiṣṇava Avatāras in the Early Skandapurāṇa,” in Origin and Growth of the Purāṇic Text Corpus: With Special Reference to the Skandapurāṇa, ed. H. T. Bakker (Delhi, 2004), 111–38, on the dating of the Narasimha myth. The exact chronology and dating of the Purāṇas is notoriously difficult. The Valmiki Ramayana, Harivaṃśa, Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Bhagavata Purāṇa, Agni Purāṇa, Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, Vayu Purāṇa, Brahma-Purāṇa, Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, Kūrma Purāṇa, Matsya Purāṇa, Padma Purāṇa, Śiva Purāṇa, Liṅga Purāṇa, and Skanda Purāṇa all contain depictions of the Narasiṃha avatāra.4. W. Doniger, “The Four Worlds,” in Animals in Four Worlds: Sculptures from India (Chicago, 1989), 20. Doniger observed that these three deities—Viṣṇu, Śiva, and Durgā—also have domesticated animals associated with them: the cow, the bull, and the buffalo, respectively. Thus the lion, when paired with any of these three animals, represents “the feral god with the bovine servant” (21).5. R. Thapar, “The Lion: From Pride to Metaphor,” in V. Thapar, R. Thapar, and Y. Ansari, Exotic Aliens: the Lion and the Cheetah in India (New Delhi, 2013), 42.6. Ibid.7. P. Albenda, “Lions on Assyrian Wall Reliefs,” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Studies 6 (1974): 1–27.8. M. B. Dick, “The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt and Yahweh’s Answer to Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 243–70; also see A. McMahon, “The Lion, the King and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia,” Iraq 71 (2009): 115–24, for evidence that as early as the fourth millennium BCE, lion hunts and caged lions were used as emblems of power and leadership in northern Syria.9. Thapa
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