Didarganj Yakshi

The sculpture is now in the Bihar Museum in Patna, Bihar, India, close to where it was found in 1917. Patna, as Pataliputra, was also the Mauryan capital.

The statue is 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m) tall on a pedestal of 1 foot 7.5 inches (49.5 cm) made of Chunar sandstone highly finished to a mirror-like polish. The life-size standing image is a tall, well-proportioned, free-standing sculpture made of sandstone with the well-polished surface associated with Mauryan polish, although this persisted for some time after the empire fell. The fly-whisk (chauri) is held in the right hand whereas the left hand is broken. The lower garment creates a somewhat transparent effect. Like many of the earliest large sculptures in Indian art, it represents a minor spiritual figure or deity, a yakshi, rather than one of the major deities.

Context and style

Female yakshi or yakshini, and male yaksha, are very minor figures, on the borders of deity. Yakshi are often local spirits of water and trees. They are figures from Indian folk religion who were accepted into the pantheons of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. In the earliest surviving Indian stone monumental sculptures, they, or at least figures identified by modern art historians as them, are very common subjects, preceding those of more significant deity figures. The Buddhist stupa sites of Sanchi and Bharhut both have many, those at Bharhut carrying inscriptions with their names.

The figure has the elements that would continue to be expected in female Indian religious statues "an elaborate headdress and jewellery, heavy spherical breasts, narrow waist, ample hips and a graceful posture ... [with] only sketchy attempts to portray such details of physical anatomy as musculature; rather it is a quality of inwardly held breath that is conveyed. This breath (prana) is identified with the essence of life...". For another scholar, the statue shows "for the first time the sculptural realization of a full and volumptuous form with a definite sense of its organic articulation". In contrast to the front, the "figure is flattened at the back with only a perfunctory indication of modelling".

According to a recent study the Didarganj Yakshi may represent the goddess Indrakshi Durga.