Such tigers were used as ritual displays in temples during important festivals such as Holi, Shivaratri, and Durga Puja.
The tiger is the vehicle of, and sacred to, the Hindu goddess, Durga. From a certain perspective, she is India’s Mother Nature, for she is the deification of Energy. Her consort, Shiva, sometimes evoked as Shambo, wears a tiger skin to indicate that he is beyond the bounds of the natural world.
Vahanas are the vehicles or mounts of deities. Vahanas in their Vedic context are conveyors of things human to the divine world. Each animal vahana, generally typical of only one deity (In the present case, it is the vahana for the goddess Durga) and this is the most reliable clue to its identification and can be interpreted as an emanation of the deity’s personality. Their purpose was to carry the images of the deities – the utsava murtis or processional images- through the streets during temple festival processions. After the festival, the vahanas are stored in the temple complex until the next temple festival. Within the Hindu tradition, the vahanas remain on the margin between folk and classical art. However, the vahanas themselves were never considered ‘art’ in the classical Hindu or the nineteenth-century European sense. The imposing, beautiful, and sometimes frightening wooden vahanas come alive as art and divinity only for a short time, to be enjoyed only for the moment. They are sacred art for the streets, and it is in this context that the richness of their life as art and as icons should be seen.
Size (cms): 33(H) x 37(W) x 13(D)
Size (inches): 13(H) x 14.5(W) x 5(D)
