[excerpt] In the West, we are not used to thinking of a piece of stone as a person, let alone as someone who holds legal rights in a modern nation-state. But in India—where gods often take figural or material form—recent rulings hold that a deity embodied in a statue does have legal rights. A bronze emanation of the powerful dancing deity, Shiva Nataraja, recently sued a British art dealer for the right to return home to Southern India.1 Indian icons serve as kosa, or shells in which divinity resides.2 These ontological beings traditionally take figural form in expensive and permanent materials, such as caste bronze or carved stone. Deities do not require elaborate works of art, however. A photocopy of a Hindu god or goddess from a local library book or a picture on a calendar could provide excellent icons for a domestic shrine in India or the Diaspora.3 A person traveling in India could happen upon a roadside shrine—often a cluster of vermilion-covered stones at the base of a sacred tree.4 These formless icons rely on materiality and location rather than figural representation to express their ontological status—the icons do not depict deities, they are manifestations of deities.

  • 1. R. Davis, “Loss and Recovery of Ritual Self Among Hindu Images,” in Journal of Ritual Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992):43–61; R. Davis, The Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); G.-D. Sontheimer, “Religious Endowments in India: The Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities,” ed. O. Spies, Zeitschift Fur Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft: Einschliebish Der Ethnologischen Rechtsforschung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlang, 1965), pp. 45–100.
  • 2. This idea of the body as a disposable shell for the soul is found in the Devi Mahatmya (verses 5:40–5:41) where kosa or bodily sheath is used to refer to Parvati, when Ambika issues forth from her and is known as Kausiki before she turns black and is known as Kali. T. Coburn, “The Structural Interplay of Tantra, Vedanta, and Bhakti: Nondualist Commentary on the Goddess,” eds. K. A. Harper and R. Brown, Roots of Tantra (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 79 and 86. The tenth-century Ambika temple in Jagat has no texts traceable to its exact time and location. In this article, I will use three main categories of Indian primary texts in relation to the Ambika temple in Jagat: 1) the Devi Mahatmya, an earlier text from around the seventh century, which is the primary source for goddess iconography in India, 2) the Agni Purana and Kalika Purana, contemporaneous North Indian religious texts; they focus on the god Shiva and the goddess Kali, respectively; and 3) the Mayamata, which is another early medieval text from South India, which deals with ritual and renovation of temples and icons.
  • 3. K. Jain “Mass Mediation, Imagined Publics, and the Triangulated Gaze,” in Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 290–301.
  • 4. P. Mookerjee, Pathway Icons: The Wayside Art of India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).