A large bronze figure of Sambandar, South India, 13th century

Acquired in Marseille, 24th August 1980. 

Sambandar is depicted as an infant, dancing with right leg raised, left arm outstretched and the right hand with one finger extended upwards in the classic posture of South Indian sculptural representations of the child-saint. The child is naked and adorned with the traditional infant’s girdle and anklets of bells, with a necklace and a sacred thread encircling his torso. The figure and the lotus flower pedestal are separately cast and attached by means of crimping the upper rim of the lotus to the plate beneath Sambandar’s left foot, in traditional South Indian fashion.

It is thought Sambandar was born towards the end of the seventh century, and from an early age sung the praises of Lord Shiva and his queen Uma. Throughout his life of devotion to the divine couple, he wrote and set to music some four thousand verses, hence the child’s ecstatic dancing posture. Sambandar’s songs are a joyous expression of the beauty and glory of Shiva and Uma in the context of the beauty of nature — of cool ponds and rich green paddy fields, cloud-capped mountains and shady groves of coconut palms abounding in peacocks, parrots and koels, see Vidya Dehejia, The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India, New York, 2002, p. 153.