Kaumari is the wife or personification of the creative force (shakti) of Kumara, the youthful Hindu god of war who is also called Skanda or Karttikeya in northern India. Accordingly, she shares Kumara’s peacock mount and his primary attribute of the spear, which is carried here in her lower left hand. Her upper left hand is held in the gesture of discourse (vitarka mudra). Her two right hands are now lost. The goddess is dancing one of the 108 dance steps and hand postures, specifically a sidestep movement (parshvakranta chari), of the Natyashastra, a treatise on classical Indian dance dating from circa 200 CE. She is graced with a lotus nimbus. A female attendant holding a flower is on her left. Kaumari is one of the Seven Mother Goddesses (Sapta Matrikas) often shown as a group flanked by Shiva and Ganesha on the lintels of northern Indian Hindu temples (see M.90.157). Here, she is represented as an independent stele that was most likely originally erected along with her divine counterparts in a temple’s ancillary shrine. The Vaishnavi, spouse of Vishnu, from this same set is now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (68.8.12).

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