Viswarupa is usually synonymous with the dazzling revelation of Krishna’s infinite divinity, as narrated in the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. The visual association that has gained popular validity is that of Vishnu, standing like a veritable pillar and the entire Hindu pantheon arranged around and in the space inhabited by the principal deity. Thus the multiple image is ascribed to the ultimate form of Vishnu and to the layman, the viswarupa is almost always the manifestation of Vishnu. That the concept of the viswarupa goes back to the cosmogenic construct—the axis mundi —in its many variations and that it also encompasses the Shaivite philosophy is admirably brought out in Maxwell’s dissertation on multiple images in Indian sculpture, dwelling on certain specific images from the first to the eighth centuries A.D. Maxwell makes a seminal contribution that furthers ‘our understanding of what the designers and sculptors of these images were trying to express and why they chose particular visual constructs as their vehicles of expression’—often emphatically rejecting earlier theories that now seem manifestly inaccurate.
May-June 1988, volume 12, No 3