Old fights, new meanings
Lions and elephants in combat
PUSHKAR SOHONI
For over a millennium in South Asia, the visual trope
of a triumphant lion vanquishing one or several
elephants has been common in architectural sculpture,
both in the round and in relief (figs. 1–2). In the rather
limited scholarship on this motif, diverse interpretations
have been offered. Although its presence has remained
fairly stable through time, there exist many minor
variations on this motif, including the use of leonine
creatures variously described as vyā las or yā lı̄ s, and the
incorporation of other fantastic creatures known
popularly as makaras in such combats.1 In South India,
the myth of the fantastic composite animal called the
Ś arabha takes this imagery yet further. Yet, the simple
image of a lion victorious over one or more elephants
was situated very strategically within certain
architectural programs for given periods and places.
For example, Deccani forts constructed between the
fifteenth and seventeenth centuries carried this
representation on their barbicans and gateways (fig. 3).
While tracing the history of this visual motif, this essay
will demonstrate that some stable forms can also be
notorious bearers of different and shifting meanings.
Lions
Lions have long held a prominent place in Indic
culture, appearing in literature and the visual arts. In
the middle of the first millennium BCE, the lion had
appeared in relation to the god Nar̄ aȳ an ̣a (not yet
associated with Vis ̣n ̣u) in the Taittiriya Ā ran ̣yaka.2 In the
Puran̄ ̣as (sacred texts of Hindu mythology composed in
the Common Era), Vis ̣ṇu appeared in one of his avatā ras
1. M. A. Dhaky, The Vyala Figures on the Mediaeval Temples of
India (Varanasi, 1965), focuses entirely on the hybrid creatures whose
bodies are arguably leonine, though their heads and tails might be
composite, drawing on other animals. As Dhaky argued, “there were
a number of specific varieties of vyalas conjured up by a skillful
hypostasis” (16), but it is clear that the dominant archetypal form was
based on a lion.
2. R. Mitra, ed., The Taittiriya Aranyaka of the Black Yajur Veda
(Osnabrü ck, 1982). The Ā raṇyakas are philosophical treatises that offer
explanations of the ritual sacrifices of the Vedas.
as the man-lion Narasimha in several texts.3 Ś iva was
compared to the lion in the Ś iva Purā n ̣a, and the lion
served as the goddess Durga’̄ s mount in the Ś iva Purā n ̣a
and the Devı̄ mahā tmya.4
The earliest extant visual depictions of lions in South
Asia are found on Mauryan columns, such as the famous
Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath (ca. 250 BCE).5 The
hunting of lions—animals which some scholars believe
were introduced to South Asia from western Asia for
royal hunts—became a marker of royal prowess during
the period of Achaemenid contact with ruling dynasties
in South Asia.6 The bas-reliefs in neo-Assyrian royal
palaces regularly depicted the king hunting lions,7 and
the presence of game reserves attached to palaces at
Nineveh and elsewhere testify to the verisimilitude of
such representations.8 When the Mauryan emperor
Aś oka (ca. 304–232 BCE) embraced Buddhism and
3. See P. Granoff, “Saving the Saviour: Ś iva and the Vais ̣n ̣ava
Avatāras in the Early Skandapurān ̣a,” in Origin and Growth of the
Purā n ̣ic Text Corpus: With Special Reference to the Skandapurā n ̣a, ed.
H. T. Bakker (Delhi, 2004), 111–38, on the dating of the Narasimha
myth. The exact chronology and dating of the Purān ̣as is notoriously
difficult. The Valmiki Ramayana, Harivaṃś a, Visṇ ̣u Purā n ̣a, Bhagavata
Purā n ̣a, Agni Purā n ̣a, Brahmā n ̣d ̣a Purā n ̣a, Vayu Purā n ̣a, Brahma-
Purā n ̣a, Visṇ ̣udharmottara Purā n ̣a, Kū rma Purā n ̣a, Matsya Purā n ̣a,
Padma Purā n ̣a, Ś iva Purā n ̣a, Liṅ ga Purā n ̣a, and Skanda Purā n ̣a all
contain depictions of the Narasiṃha avatā ra.
4. W. Doniger, “The Four Worlds,” in Animals in Four Worlds:
Sculptures from India (Chicago, 1989), 20. Doniger observed that these
three deities—Vis ̣n ̣u, Ś iva, and Durgā—also have domesticated
animals associated with them: the cow, the bull, and the buffalo,
respectively. Thus the lion, when paired with any of these three
animals, represents “the feral god with the bovine servant” (21).
5. R. Thapar, “The Lion: From Pride to Metaphor,” in V. Thapar, R.
Thapar, and Y. Ansari, Exotic Aliens: the Lion and the Cheetah in India
(New Delhi, 2013), 42.
6. Ibid.
7. P. Albenda, “Lions on Assyrian Wall Reliefs,” Journal of Ancient
Near Eastern Studies 6 (1974): 1–27.
8. M. B. Dick, “The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt and Yahweh’s
Answer to Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2006): 243–70; also
see A. McMahon, “The Lion, the King and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic
Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia,” Iraq 71 (2009):
115–24, for evidence that as early as the fourth millennium BCE, lion
hunts and caged lions were used as emblems of power and leadership
in northern Syria.
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Figure 1. Rampant lion over a vanquished elephant, eleventh or twelfth

century, façade of the Indra Sabha Cave (cave 32), Jaina caves at Ellora,
Maharashtra. Photo: author. Color version available as an online
enhancement.

began to emphasize nonviolence, the lion became an
emblem of royal strength rather than a symbolic object
of royal domination. As Romila Thapar has pointed out,
Indian dynasties like the Mauryans thus reformulated
the motifs and ideas of the Achaemenids (and later the
Seleucids), adapting them to their own culture.9 Lions
were also depicted as guardians in Buddhist architecture
at the sites of Amravati and Karle (ca. 200–100 BCE),
both in the Deccan. In early Buddhist architecture, the
lion, along with the horse, the elephant, and the zebu,
were considered auspicious. All these animals appeared
as a standard quartet on many Mauryan pillars.10
The image of the lion as an animal hunted by a king,
and also as a personification of royal power itself, was
consolidated under the Gupta dynasty. Though there are
occasional examples of lion hunts of earlier date, such
as a Shunga-period sculpture at Sanchi (second century
BCE), it was under the Gupta dynasty that the lion
and the sun became prominent symbols of royalty.
Chandragupta II (r. ca. 375–414 CE) issued gold coins
that depicted him hunting a lion and bore the legend
Simhavikrama, which can be translated as “valorous
among lions.” As his royal title was Vikramaditya
(literally “the valorous sun”), several congruous
representations of royalty (both literary and visual) were
conflated: poets and artists often compared the sun, with
its halo of flares, with the form of a golden lion with its
mane. The contemporaneous Sasanians, with whom the
Guptas had contact, valorized the lion hunt as a marker
of kingship and power, and their coins and metalware
regularly depicted such hunts.11 The hunting pose of
Chandragupta II, which shows the archer’s body turned

9. Thapar, “The Lion,” 42. 11. P. Pal, Indian Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles
10. A. van der Geer, Animals in Stone: Indian Mammals County Museum of Art Collection, vol. 1, Circa 500 B.C.–A.D. 700
Sculptured through Time (Leiden, 2008), 334. (Los Angeles, 1986), 74.

Figure 2. Three triumphant lions dominating three elephants,
eleventh century, base of a column at the Rajarani temple,
Bhubaneshwar, Odisha. Photo: author. Color version
available as an online enhancement.
backward as he shoots an arrow, clearly mimics
Sasanian iconography of royal hunts. In literary and
visual representations in the early first millennium CE,
the “lion-seat” (siṃhā sana) became an emblem for a
royal throne, as in the epic of the Mahā bhā rata.12
After the Guptas, the Pallavas continued to use the
lion as a symbol of royal power. The Pallava dynasty
was revived under the king Simhavis ̣n ̣u, whose name
meant “lion-Vis ̣n ̣u” (r. ca. 555–590 CE). From the
eighth century onward his successors—particularly
Narasimhavarman II, also known as Rajasimha, or “royal
lion” (r. ca. 700–728 CE)—patronized cave temples
that deployed lions as column supports, brackets for
cornices, and decorative elements. By the tenth century
in eastern India, under the Pala dynasty, the lion came
to denote spiritual as well as royal power, as evidenced
by its use on throne supports for the Buddha. And by the
eleventh century, the lion in combat with a warrior was
a common enough trope for royalty that the image of the
first Hoysala king Ś al̄ a slaying a lion became the so-
called “Hoysala emblem” in South India and the
Deccan. At every Hoysala temple, a sculpture of a
warrior slaying a lion can be found, typically on the
ś ukanā sa (the porch above the frontal projection of a
temple).13
12. Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia’s Lions (Mumbai, 2005), 75,
mentions the use of the word in the Mahā bhā rata as an example of
how Sanskrit literature played an important role in affirming the role of
the lion as a marker of royalty and valor.
13. A. Hardy, Indian Temple Architecture: Form and
Transformation; the Karn ̣ā tạ Drā vid ̣a Tradition, 7th to 13th Centuries
(New Delhi, 1995), 253.
Sohoni: Old fights, new meanings 227
Figure 3. Lion overpowering several elephants, Deccan
sultanates, sixteenth or seventeenth century, entrance
gateway of the Fort of Janjira off the coast of Maharashtra.
Photo: author. Color version available as an online
enhancement.
Hybrid creatures with leonine features also appear
on sculpted panels at temples. These imaginary beasts
tend to have feline bodies with some combination of
heads, limbs, and tails from other animals. It is worth
mentioning that these animals occasionally replace or
supplement lions in combat with elephants (fig. 4).
These leonine hybrid creatures, known as vyā las, are
the subject of a monograph by the noted art historian
Madhusudan Dhaky. Dhaky proposed that the hybrid
and fanciful nature of these creatures was a result of the
importation of griffinesque beasts from western Asia, the
presumed absence of lions in South India, or a
combination of these factors.14
Elephants
In the second millennium BCE, Indra was often
associated with an elephant, as he was the king of the
Vedic gods and the elephant was understood as a royal
mount. The elephant also accompanied Indra in his
capacity as the god of rain, where it appears as a large
grey cloud, and as the god of war, where it serves as a
war machine.15 The elephant was also an important
signifier in Buddhism. According to the story of the
Buddha’s birth, his mother dreamed of a white elephant
entering her womb through her side. The elephant
eventually became a symbol for the Buddha himself.
The earliest extant representations of elephants in Asia
14. Dhaky, The Vyala Figures, 1–3.
15. Doniger, “The Four Worlds,” 20.
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Figure 4. Composite mythical leonine
creature (vyā la/yā l ı̄ ) fighting an
elephant, thirteenth century, Sun
Temple at Konark, Odisha. Photo:
author. Color version available as an
online enhancement.
are in the Buddhist narrative scenes sculpted at Bharhut
(ca. 200 BCE), depicting the birth of the Buddha. The
major Buddhist sites of Sarnath, Amravati, Sanchi, and
Ajanta all have representations of the Buddha as an
elephant in that narrative. The elephant also came to
symbolize evil power in Buddhist lore, beginning with
the story of Devadatta sending the elephant Nalagirı ̄ to
kill the Buddha.16 That elephant was subsequently
subdued by the Buddha and became a symbol of
untamed natural power in medieval Sanskrit literature
from the first millennium onward. Temple Hinduism (the
phase of the religion when temples became the location
of worship, beginning sometime in the fifth century CE)
and the Puran ̄ ̣as valorized elephants due to their
16. B. Nanamoli, ed. and trans., The Life of the Buddha, as It
Appears in the Pali Canon, the Oldest Authentic Record (Kandy,
1972), 264–66.
association with the three major deities: Ś iva slew an
elephant and wore its skin; Vis ̣n ̣u freed a trapped
elephant; and the goddess Lakś mi was often depicted
with two elephants in attendance showering good
fortune upon her. The typology of a goddess with
flanking elephants appeared as early as ca. 200 BCE,
in a relief carving at Sanchi. In the later Puranas, the
elephant-headed god Gan ̣eś a was created by Ś iva after
he beheaded Parvati’s attendant, not having recognized
him as his own son; Ś iva resuscitated him by affixing
an elephant’s head to his body, thus establishing the
elephant firmly in the Hindu pantheon.
In the visual arts, a pair of elephants flanking a door,
gateway, or portal came to be associated with power
and prestige, and can be seen very early at the
Pitalkhora caves (ca. 200–100 BCE) in the western
Deccan. Through the period of Buddhist presence in
South Asia, elephants were first treated as symbols for
the Buddha, and later as emblems of royal power.17
Beyond its divine associations, the elephant became a
marker of royalty, and by the sixteenth century the
Mughals used elephants to flank the entrances to their
palaces, as can be seen at Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, and
Delhi. As Ebba Koch has argued, the practice of carving
life-size elephants in the round was taken up by Akbar
(1542–1605 CE) and Jahangir (1569–1627 CE) as a way
of demonstrating imperial control over nature.18 Babur
(1483–1530 CE), the earliest sovereign of the Mughal
dynasty, had admired the lifelike sculptures of elephants
at the fort of Gwalior when he captured it, and the
practice of installing them at the entrances to palaces
continued under his successors.19
Lions and elephants in combat
Battles between lions and elephants were a standard
theme in the decoration of most medieval Hindu and
Jaina temples in South Asia after the seventh century.
17. Doniger, “The Four Worlds,” 11: “Battles between elephants
and lions are a favorite theme of sculpture and poetry; generally, the
lion is victorious. Male elephants in rut are a metaphor for power (not
only sexual) raging out of control, an obviously masculine symbol.
On the other hand, the ideal woman is said to have breasts like the
swelling frontal lobes of elephants and to walk with the gait of a
female elephant. Thus the elephant in its natural state functions as a
symbol of both male and female power.”
18. E. Koch, “My Garden Is Hindustan: The Mughal Padshah’s
Realization of a Political Metaphor,” in Middle East Garden Traditions:
Unity and Diversity. Questions, Methods and Resources in a
Multicultural Perspective, ed. M. Conan (Washington, DC, 2007), 159–
75.
19. Ibid., 167.

Figure 5. Elephant and lion in combat, ca. 750–775,
basement band of the Kailasa temple (cave 16), Hindu caves
at Ellora, Maharashtra. Photo: author. Color version available
as an online enhancement.
Combating elephants and lions of the same size form
a band around the base of the Kailasa temple at Ellora
in western India (ca. 750–75 CE), built under the
Rashtrakutas (fig. 5). Occasionally, vyā las (leonine
hybrids) also appear in this band. Many stelae dating
between the eighth and twelfth centuries show Ś aiva,
Vais ̣n ̣ava, Buddhist, or Jaina deities flanked by elephant-
lion duels. This is particularly common in sculpture from
eastern India (fig. 6).20
Literary representations of the same theme, in which
the lion is usually victorious, are also common. The
Mahā bhā rata, in its “core” recension (dated as early
as 150 BCE by Alf Hiltebeitel and very conservatively
to no later than the fourth century CE in its complete
redacted form), frequently alludes to the trope of the lion
defeating an elephant as a metaphor for military valor.21
Heroes are often compared with lions, and their prowess
over actual elephants in battle is a common theme.22
Another early literary example is from the fifth-century
Kumā rasambhava by Kalidasa, a Sanskrit writer
contemporary with Chandragupta II:
20. G. Sengupta, S. Saha, et al., Vibrant Rock: A Catalogue of
Stone Sculptures in the State Archaeological Museum, West Bengal
(Kolkata, 2014).
21. A. Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahā bhā rata: A Reader’s Guide
to the Education of the Dharma King (Chicago, 2001), 18–21.
22. The Drona Parva of the Mahā bhā rata is particularly rich in
metaphors of victorious princes as lions and descriptions of elephants
as fighting animals, though often vanquished; see Mahabharata. Book
Seven: Drona, ed. and trans. V. Pilikian, 2 vols. (New York, 2009).
Sohoni: Old fights, new meanings 229
Figure 6. Detail from a sculpture of the Hindu god
Kartikeya with a lion vanquishing an elephant, Pala
dynasty, twelfth century, Bengal. Chlorite. Indian
Museum, Kolkata. Photo: author. Color version
available as an online enhancement.
Though the prints marked out in blood are washed away
by the melting snow, mountain hunters still can follow
the tracks of lions who have struck down elephants
through the pearls that fall from the hollows between
claws.23
Several other poets, such as Bharavi, who was active
just a few generations later in the sixth century CE,
mentioned lions and elephants as metaphorical enemies.
In the Kirā tā rjunı̄ ya, Bharavi describes how the lion
“springs at thundering clouds,” thinking them to be
elephants.24
23. The Origin of the Young God: Kā lidā sa’s Kumā rasambhava,
trans. H. Heifetz (Berkeley, 1985), 22 (sarga 1, verse 6). Several
references to elephants, real and metaphorical, occur throughout the
work—e.g., “and the letters look like spots on the skins of aging
elephants” (sarga 1, verse 7) and “Elephants, trying to rub away the
itch of rut” (sarga 1, verse 9)—but none use the trope of combat.
24. I. Viswanathan Peterson, Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit
̄ of Bhā ravi (Albany, 2003), 82.
Court Epic: The Kirātārjunıya
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The motif of the lion and elephant in combat was

widespread across the entire subcontinent by the ninth
century CE. New terms, such as gajasimha (“elephant
[and] lion”), were designated for depictions of this
combat.25 The term gajasimha vyā la eventually came to
refer to a hybrid with a lion’s body and an elephant’s
head. The literary trope of the triumphant lion
overcoming the elephant was also common in the
sandeś a poetry in Sinhala (the language of Sri Lanka).
For example, in the Mayura Sandeś a:
Laksmi is always enticed to rest upon his chest,
A lion to his enemies, he doesn’t spare the foreheads
of elephants,
He’s made wealth attainable, heaping it up across
Lanka,
May that highest of kings, the strong-armed
Bhuvanekabāhu, be victorious in this city!26

In Sanskrit literature, the word ś ā rdū la was used for

the lion as well as a whole host of hybrid, primarily
leonine, beasts.27 Ś ā rdū la is additionally the name of a
poetic meter in Sanskrit, and therefore the image of the
lion as a ś ā rdū la was considered an embodiment of
meter and rhythm.28 Human riders commonly appear on
the ś ā rdū la and the vyā la rampant over an elephant, as
in the temples at Mahabalipuram in South India (seventh
century CE). Since they are found from the seventh to
the twentieth centuries in most regions of India, and in
every style of sculpture, a study of all the motifs and
variations of this leo-pachyderm theme deserves separate
treatment, far beyond the scope of this essay.
In addition to South Asian religious architecture, the
lion and elephant combat also appeared on forts and
palaces of the sultanates of the Deccan. By this period,
the motif had acquired a talismanic function, and all
forts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
bore it, usually on important bastions and entrance
gates.29 Irrespective of the sectarian affiliation of the
rulers, the motif consistently bears the same elements:
a single lion vanquishing elephants varying in number
25. van der Geer, Animals in Stone, 221–23, 225.
26. Translation by Philip Friedrich based on Siri Tilakasiri, ed.,
Mayura Sandeś aya, verse 14 (Colombo, 2013). It is part of a larger
praś asti (eulogy) for Bhuvanekabāhu V, a minor king from fourteenth-
century Gampola.
27. S. Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, vol. 2 (Delhi, 1976), 332.
28. Ibid., 336. Kramrisch considered the ś ā rdū la to be a
“hypostasis” of the parts of the kirtimukha—a leonine face with an
apotropaic function (333).
29. For a study specifically focusing on doorways with variations
of this motif, see M. Ṭend ̣ulakara, Gad ̣a-mandirā varila dvā raś ilpa
(Pune, 2011).
Figure 7. Metal object that has been identified as a weight
composed of a lion grappling with five elephants with its legs
and tail, sixteenth century, Deccan. Photo: courtesy Ranros
Universal SA, British Virgin Islands. Color version available as
an online enhancement.
from one to six. Small metal objects such as weights
sometimes carried this motif (fig. 7), as did large
weapons, suggesting the talismanic quality attributed
to it. The Malik-i-Maidan cannon, the largest in India
when it was cast in the sixteenth century, also had a
rendition of this motif (fig. 8). The swell of the cannon’s
muzzle was carved to appear like the head of a lion
crushing an elephant in its jaws. Each of the forts of the
Deccan retains at least one extant relief panel of the
lion-elephant duel, wherein the lion is always shown
victorious, irrespective of the communal or sectarian
identity of the patrons (fig. 9). Shias, Sunnis, Deccanis,
Siddis, and Marathas all used this imagery for its magical
quality, the precise meaning of which is unknown, but
was certainly connected with royal conquest and
invincibility.
Between metaphor and motif: Reading images
and envisioning texts
Scholars have offered multiple interpretations of the
lion and elephant in combat. Some have read the motif
as a literal representation of social history: one scholar
attributed its prevalence to the popularity of animal

Figure 8. Malik-i-Maidan cannon, cast in Ahmadnagar,
ca. 1550–65, Bijapur Fort, Karnataka. Photo: author.
Color version available as an online enhancement.
combats as public entertainment in medieval Rajasthan,
but this is an overly simplistic reading.30 Though most
treatments of the motif in studies on architecture and art
have been merely descriptive, there have been some
attempts to uncover deeper meanings. These studies
usually refer to texts from very different periods to
bolster a singular meaning; for example, Kramrisch’s
magnum opus, The Hindu Temple, offers evocative
readings of one iteration of the motif that depicted lions
on the head of an elephant.31 She cites an eighth- or
ninth-century inscription referring to the lion releasing
“brilliant pearls” (referring to blood or perhaps the
secretion released during the rutting season) from the
“storehouse of darkness” that is the elephant, and similar
imagery from poetic and epigraphic sources.32
30. A. Kalia, Art of Osian Temples: Socio-Economic and Religious
Life in India, 8th–12th Centuries A.D. (New Delhi, 1982), 41.
31. Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, 332–37.
32. Ibid., 336.
Sohoni: Old fights, new meanings 231
Figure 9. Lion vanquishing elephants, ca. 1500–1625,
entrance gate, Fort of Daulatabad, Maharashtra. Photo:
author. Color version available as an online enhancement.
Giovanni Verardi has suggested that the lion
represented the Brahmanical forces of medieval
India. The Mimam ̄ ̣sa philosopher Kumar̄ ila Bhatta
(fl. ca. 700 CE), who argued against Buddhist and
Jaina philosophical positions, was known by the
moniker of Simhanad ̄ a (“lion’s roar”).33 Verardi has
demonstrated that Buddhists of the period were mocked
by being called elephants, perhaps an allusion to the
use of an elephant as the symbol of the Buddha, or
because of the story of his birth in which an elephant
features prominently.34 He cited several sources,
including the Sankara Digvijaya, which states that “when
the elephants of Jaina and Buddhist heretics disappeared
because of the roaming lion of Kumarila, the tree of
Vedic wisdom began to spread everywhere with
luxuriant foliage.”35 Verardi also mentions several
Brahmanical and Jaina inscriptions from Karnataka
where the Buddhists are explicitly referred to as
elephants.36 He argues for the lions symbolizing Ś iva
and the trampling elephants representing Buddhists in
several relief sculptures at South Indian temple sites
patronized by the Pallavas, such as the Talagirisvara
33. S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men:
Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley, 2006), 55.
34. G. Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India
(New Delhi, 2011), 221.
35. Madhava-Vidyaranya, Sankara-Dig-Vijaya: The Traditional Life
of Sri Sankaracharya, trans. Swami Tapasyananda (Madras, 1996), 9.
36. Verardi, Hardships and Downfall, 221.
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Figure 10. Lion triumphant over an elephant who has
subdued a human, thirteenth century, Sun Temple at
Konark, Odisha. Photo: William Henry Cornish, 1890,
© British Library Board, Photo 1003/354. Color version
available as an online enhancement.
Temple in Panamalai (early eighth century CE) and the
Vaikuntha Perumal in Kanchi (late eighth century CE).37
In addition to the eighth-century Kailasa temple at Ellora
(fig. 5), this motif is also seen in the thirteenth-century
Konark Sun Temple in Odisha (formerly Orissa, eastern
India; fig. 10). While Verardi makes a case for a
particular reading of lions and elephants representing
Brahmanical and Buddhist faiths, respectively, he also
recognizes the “semantic ambiguity of figurative art,”
questioning if the elephants might simply represent
vanquished political foes.38 After all, lions have been
depicted as powerful beasts faithful to the Buddha and
often supporting his throne, particularly in sculptures
from Gandhara (first to the fourth century CE).39 In
contrast, the Rajasimhesvara temple in the Kailasanathar
37. Ibid., 223–24.
38. Ibid., 223.
39. Van der Geer, Animals in Stone, 350.
precinct of Kanchi bears an inscription describing the
aforementioned Pallava king Narasimhavarman II as
“that pious king of kings . . . who proved a royal lion
(Rajasimha) to the dense troops of the elephants of his
daring foes!”40 His nickname, Rajasimha (“royal lion”),
would eventually characterize various ruling families
who claimed warrior lineages by adopting names such
as Singh, Sinha, or Simha. Verardi was convinced that
the meaning of the lion and the elephant symbolized the
“opposition between the victorious orthodox kings (the
lions) and the defeated Buddhists (the elephants).”41 Yet,
in Sanskrit literature, the lion as the king of beasts was
regularly employed as a metaphor for kings of men, as
Daniel H. H. Ingalls showed in his translation of the
Subhā sitaratnakos
̣ ́ a by the Buddhist scholar Vidyak̄ ara
(ca. 1050–1130).42 In this Buddhist work, just and wise
kings are likened to lions, full of valor and virtue. This
metaphor of a just king as a lion was common in the
literary tradition, irrespective of the king’s faith. It was,
for instance, used in the eulogies of Buddhist kings in
Sri Lanka, therefore indicating that Verardi’s sectarian
interpretation of Hindu lions against Buddhist elephants
does not always carry merit.
Other scholars of medieval and early modern South
Asia have interpreted the lion-elephant combat motif
as an allegory of particular ruling dynasties, but these
readings depend on perceived correspondences between
dynasty and animal that are often fallacious. For
example, the victorious feline at the temple at Konark
(thirteenth century CE) has erroneously been interpreted
as a symbol of the Kesari dynasty.43 However, the
temple was built by the Eastern Gangas, who came to
power after the Kesaris, and the royal emblem of the
Gangas was the elephant. If these sculptures were
vestigial imagery from the Kesari dynasty that the
40. E. Hultzsch, South-Indian Inscriptions, vol. 1 (Madras, 1890),
14.
41. G. Verardi, Issues in the History of Indian Buddhism (Kyoto,
2014), 14.
42. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyā kara’s
“Subhā sitaratnakos
̣ ̣ trans. D. H. H. Ingalls (Cambridge, MA, 1965),
a,”
300.
43. “The animals that are found abundantly represented are the
lion and the elephant; they are often found together, the former
standing over the latter in the crouching state. This, according to
some, is representative of the ascendency of Brahminism over
Buddhism, the votaries of which held the elephant in great sanctity.
This is probably indicative of the ascendency of one dynasty, the
Kesaris, over another. . . . The lion was the emblem of the Kesaris,
whence the name of the dynasty is derived, and the elephant was that
of the unknown dynasty referred to.” M. M. Ganguly, Orissa and Her
Remains: Ancient and Mediaeval (District Puri) (Calcutta, 1912), 202.
 Sohoni: Old fights, new meanings 233

Gangas chose to retain, then the meaning of the motif

would be understood differently. It was not uncommon
for successive royal lineages to maintain and patronize
the same imagery, thus disproving the assumption of a
simple correspondence between beast and dynasty.
In the world of the Bahmani and post-Bahmani
sultanates of the late medieval Deccan (1347–1565),
the lion-elephant combat took on a slightly different
form. The scale was often distorted, with the elephants
appearing as miniature creatures gripped by the claws of
the lion. The motif persisted as a marker of protection
and a symbol of sovereign kingship for another few
hundred years, until the consolidation of Mughal power
in the Deccan in the late seventeenth century. The early
Marathas in the early seventeenth century were the last
Figure 11. Lion vanquishing elephants, ca. 1670, main
to use the image of the lion vanquishing elephants
gateway to Raigad Fort, Western Ghats, Maharashtra. Photo:
on their palaces and forts; after them it completely
author. Color version available as an online enhancement.
disappeared. The early Maratha kingdom under Ś ivaj̄ ı ̄
Bhonsle (1630–80 CE) had retained the court culture of
the late sultanates, his ancestors on both sides having And pointed like the tip
served for generations at the court of the Nizam Shahi Of an elephant goad;
dynasty (1490–1636). It is therefore no surprise that the He was formidable and resolute.46
lion-elephant motif appears on the gateway at Raigad,
Kruijtzer contends that the text and image work hand
the fort that Ś ivaj̄ ı ̄ built as his new capital and where he
in glove—that the poem and the relief sculpture at
had a grand coronation ceremony for himself in 1674
Raigad are manifestations of the same idea in different
(fig. 11). He also commissioned a poem called the
media. But we do not have any literary representations
Ś ivabhā rata (also known as the Suryavamś a Anupurā n ̣a),
in Sanskrit, Marathi, Deccani, or Persian from the
which invoked the metaphor of the lion vanquishing
preceding two hundred years, when the sculpted motif
the elephant. As a mahā kā vya (a type of epic poem)
of lions conquering elephants was common throughout
imitative of Kalidasa’s Raghuvamś a, it is not surprising
the Deccan. Thus, it is probable that the literary and the
that the Ś ivabhā rata employed a classical meter as
visual motifs in the sultanate and Maratha periods were
well as metaphors from older Sanskrit poetry.44 In this
divergent, each with its own life and history, even as
context, the use of the pachydermatous allegory for
they described the same imagery.
Ś ivaj̄ ı’s
̄ enemies was only an imitation of earlier Sanskrit
usages. Gijs Kruijtzer has detailed the numerous times
***
in the poem that elephant metaphors were used for
enemies, in opposition to Ś ivaj̄ ı ̄ and his father, Shahaji,
Scholars of Indian art and architecture have often
who are repeatedly likened to lions.45 For example, the
relied on the literary tradition in their interpretation of
confrontation of Ś ivaj̄ ı ̄ with Afzal Khan was portrayed
visual motifs, the meanings of which were thought to be
thus:
contained within literature.47 The implied assumption is
The enemy Afzal saw that hero [Ś ivājı]̄ that literature was prescriptive of plastic forms of art, and
As he came down the mountain, that the literary meaning was thus primary. In the case of
Taking the quick steps of a lion the lion-elephant combat, the motif continued a life of
To stand there before him. its own, with different temporal and regional contexts
His [Ś ivājı’s]
̄ beard was beautiful and long
investing it with different meanings. The lion was

44. S. S. Bahulkar, “The Ś ivabhā rata in the Context of Classical

Mahā kā vya Literature,” in The Epic of Shivaji: Kavindra Paramananda’s 46. The Epic of Shivaji, 262.
Ś ivabhā rata, trans. J. W. Laine (Hyderabad, 2001), 34–40. 47. See J. Williams, “Criticizing and Evaluating the Visual Arts in
45. G. Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India (Leiden, India: A Preliminary Example,” Journal of Asian Studies 47 (1988):
2009), 160–61. 3–28.
234 RES 67/68 2016/2017

associated with virtue and morality from an early period most likely deriving from the former. But the metaphor
and was certainly associated with royal power from and the motif evolved independently of each other, with
early in the first millennium of the Common Era. In the different significations. Very unusually, in the middle of
Kirā tā rjunı̄ ya of Bhar̄ avı,̄ we see that the moral and royal the seventeenth century, the metaphor and the motif
power of the lion is embodied in the Pandava king converged upon the same event with the coronation of
Yudhisthira, also known for his righteousness, whose Ś ivaj̄ ı.̄ Even if they eventually converge upon the same
name means “steady in war.” He is contrasted with his meanings of military prowess and royal power, their
enemies, the elephants, who represent unrefined and ontological status, their ceremonial placement, and
untamed power.48 But images of lions and elephants their modes of deployment are completely independent.
were not in themselves signifiers of singular meanings; The literary lion and elephant are not the same as
multiple meanings were projected upon them.49 their sculptural representations; the visual images have
The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce helps weathered much better and continue to attract new
elucidate the representation of the elephant and lion meanings, displaying the anxieties of every period in
in combat. For Peirce, semiotic meaning depends which they are received. While a given motif can appear
upon three factors: the object (signified), the sign or in both literary and visual culture, it does not necessarily
representamen (signifier), and the interpretant (an follow that it has the same significance in its literary and
individual’s interpretation of and/or reaction to the visual manifestations. To the contrary, literature and the
relationship between the object and sign).50 Peirce visual arts have distinct histories that endow a given
therefore had three elements in his semiotic system, motif with specific meanings in different periods and
in contrast to Ferdinand de Saussure’s dualistic model places. Texts can be used to clarify visual forms, but
of signifier/signified. The representation of the lion- only if the text is from the same time and place as the
elephant duel is thus a signifier according to Saussurean image.
semiotics, and a representamen (or sign) according to
Peirce.51 The various meanings attributed to the motif
across time would be different interpretants, according
to Peirce’s scheme. Perhaps it is not pertinent to
obsess over what constitutes the true meaning of
these representations, which is elusive. For at least two
millennia, the elephant-lion duel has served as a signifier
of royal power, perhaps with completely different
interpretants (as per Peirce), such as military prowess or
moral facility. The two interesting, and not unconnected,
features of the sign of lions triumphant over elephants
are that the form remained relatively stable for a very
long period of time, and that it was expressed with
adequate creativity to accommodate all the meanings
that were layered onto it across different periods and
regions.
The visual and literary representations of the lion
fighting the elephant were two distinct manifestations of
the same theme, with their own histories of transmission.
The literary history of this metaphor begins in the early
first millennium, whereas the plastic expression of the
motif is not seen until the middle of the millennium,

48. Viswanathan Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 82–83.

49. For a discussion of the diverse symbolic meanings of elephants
and lions, see van der Geer, Animals in Stone, 189–225, 332–61.
50. C. S. Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. J.
Hoopes (Chapel Hill, 1991), 8.
51. Ibid., 23–33.