Udayagiri Caves - Political and Historical Allegory

Political and Historical Allegory

In an academic paper on historical and political allegory in Gupta art published in 1983, Frederick M. Asher argued that the depiction of Vāraha at Udayagiri symbolised the unification of Northern India under the rule of Candragupta II. In this way, Asher argued that Vāraha's rescue of the Earth from the chaos of the cosmic sea echoed Candragupta II's rescue of Northern India from the political instability and fragmentation that it had experienced prior to the rise of the Gupta Empire. Across much of India during this period, Vāraha had been used as a symbol of royalty, but Asher opined that "nowhere is the allegory stated in such magnificent visual terms" as at Udayagiri.

Asher identified further potential political allegories in two figures depicted on one of the two projecting walls, who were female personifications of Gaṅgā and Yamunā, the rivers that flowed through the heartland of the Gupta Empire. Asher suggested that while these two figures were here depicted flowing into the primeval ocean, Ekavarṇa, from which Vāraha saved the Earth, they also carried with them further political allegory. In Sanskrit, the word for ocean is samudra, and so Asher suggested that to people of the time this might have recalled the name of Samudra Gupta, Candragupta II's father, who merged many kingdoms into his empire in the same way that the two rivers merged into the ocean. Although not rejecting them, the scholar Michael D. Willis expressed caution in accepting Asher's theories here.