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Indian and Himalayan Art

The Great Goddess Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon (Mahishasuramardini)

Made in Kota, Rajasthan, India, Asia

c. 1750

Artist/maker unknown, India

Opaque watercolor and gold- and silver-colored metallic paint on paper
10 11/16 x 12 3/8 inches (27.1 x 31.4 cm)

Currently not on view

1994-148-390

Stella Kramrisch Collection, 1994

Label

The most common image of a buffalo (mahisha in Sanskrit) is Mahishasura, the buffalo demon. Son of a buffalo, Mahishasura gained power over the world and plunged it into chaos. To destroy him, the gods pooled their energies to create the great goddess Durga. Here the many-armed Durga leaps from her feline vehicle and slices through the buffalo's neck, from which the green, horned demon emerges in human form. The water buffalo is thought to embody ignorance, laziness, and pollution; it is associated with blood and is the vahana (vehicle) of Yama, God of Death. Although domestic water buffalo have long provided milk, agricultural power, and meat across India, ancient texts describe them as a nondomesticated species, representing the chaos of wilderness--and thus the absence of cosmic order.

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Additional information:

  • PublicationPhiladelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

    The great Hindu goddess Durga, the demon slayer, keeps the world free from ills and afflictions. She is formidable; she fights with weapons of all the gods. Here, in one from a group of Durga images from the Kotah school that are unrivaled in Indian painting, she is shown as the slayer of the greatest of all demons, the buffalo, the embodiment of evil. As Durga leaps from her lion mount onto the back of the falling buffalo and spears the beast, his green demon shape emerges from the body of the dying animal. This is an act of grace that Durga performs at the edge of the world, where in the turquoise vastness framed by the glow of a sun that has risen over the nascent vegetation of the earth this primordial battle takes place. Stella Kramrisch, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 57.

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