This tour de force of Nepalese bronze casting depicts Chamunda, one of the fiercest forms of the Great Goddess, Durga, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Her name is a contraction of the names of the demon generals Chanda and Munda, whom she slew in battle (see M.70.70). She is also one of the Mother Goddess (matrikas), the female creative aspects (shaktis) of the Hindu gods (see M.71.110.2 and M.80.157).
The emaciated Chamunda is naked with desiccated breasts and bony limbs. She has fangs, a lolling tongue, and a third eye in her expressive face. She wears a tiara of skulls with fanlike fillets, a bear-skin loin cloth, and a long garland of severed skulls (mundamala). Chamunda has sixteen arms mainly holding various weapons. Beginning with the uppermost left hand and continuing clockwise, they are an elephant’s foot, trident with skulls, club, shield, severed head, the gesture of flicking drops of wine or blood as a tantric offering (bindu mudra), skull cup, chopper (also known as a flaying knife), sword, trident, noose (?), and another elephant’s foot. Originally, she held a flayed elephant’s skin behind her like a cape (only the elephant skin’s support lug remains on her back). She sits with her legs spread wide apart on a seat formed by three skulls, perhaps symbolic of the three ages: past, present, and future. Her legs are supported by her prostrate corpse (mritaka) mount. Flanking her are two carnivorous ghouls (pishacas) with lolling tongues and a hungry jackal representing the charnel grounds.
See Vidya Dehejia, et al, Devi: The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art (Washington: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in association with Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad and Prestel Verlag, Munich, 1999), pp. 232-233, no. 11.
