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Elements of Hindu Iconography
This treatise is an early attempt for a diligent search into the origin, descriptions, symbols, mythological background, meaning and moral aims of Hindu images.
The book is in two volumes, each volume again in two parts.
Vol. I, Part I contains a long Introduction discussing among other things the origin of Hindu image worship in India, explanatory description of the terms employed in the work, Ganapati, Visnu and his major and minor avataras and manifestations, Garuda and Ayudha-Purushas or personified images of the weapons and emblems held by gods.
Vol. I, Part II deals with Aditya and Nava Grahas (nine planets) and their symbolic features and images worshipped, Devi (Goddesses), Parivara-devatas, and measurement of proportions in images.
Vol. II, Part I begins with an Introduction discussing the cult of Siva which is followed by such important topics as Siva, Lingas, Lingodbhavamurti, Chandrasekharamurti, Pasupatamurti and Raudrapasupatamurti, other Ugra forms of Siva, Dakshinamurti, Kankalamurti and Bhikshatanamurti, and other important aspects of Siva.
Vol. II, Part II contains descriptions of Subrahmanya, Nandikesvara and Adhikaranandi, Chandesvara, Bhaktas, Arya or Hariharaputra, Kshetrapalas, Brahma, the Dikpalakas, and demi-gods. In addition the book contains 5 Appendices including Sanskrit texts of Parivaradevatah, Uttamadasatalavidhih and Pratimalaksanani.
The treatment has been made interesting by profuse illustrations, the two volumes containing as many as 282 photographs of sacred images.
The book is in two volumes, each volume again in two parts.
Vol. I, Part I contains a long Introduction discussing among other things the origin of Hindu image worship in India, explanatory description of the terms employed in the work, Ganapati, Visnu and his major and minor avataras and manifestations, Garuda and Ayudha-Purushas or personified images of the weapons and emblems held by gods.
Vol. I, Part II deals with Aditya and Nava Grahas (nine planets) and their symbolic features and images worshipped, Devi (Goddesses), Parivara-devatas, and measurement of proportions in images.
Vol. II, Part I begins with an Introduction discussing the cult of Siva which is followed by such important topics as Siva, Lingas, Lingodbhavamurti, Chandrasekharamurti, Pasupatamurti and Raudrapasupatamurti, other Ugra forms of Siva, Dakshinamurti, Kankalamurti and Bhikshatanamurti, and other important aspects of Siva.
Vol. II, Part II contains descriptions of Subrahmanya, Nandikesvara and Adhikaranandi, Chandesvara, Bhaktas, Arya or Hariharaputra, Kshetrapalas, Brahma, the Dikpalakas, and demi-gods. In addition the book contains 5 Appendices including Sanskrit texts of Parivaradevatah, Uttamadasatalavidhih and Pratimalaksanani.
The treatment has been made interesting by profuse illustrations, the two volumes containing as many as 282 photographs of sacred images.
1657 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 7, 2020
This massive tome, presently distributed among four volumes published by the good people at MLBD, is a work that would remain unsurpassable. Archaeology has taken huge strides in the hundred plus years since its publication. But in terms of sheer volume and rogour shown to list the varous names and shapes of icons as described in various texts, it remains the ultimate corpus.
There have been several works since then. We have had Jitendra N. Bannerjee's monumental yet sceptical work. We have had works in other languages which have described iconography 'as-it-is' instead of following the 'as-it-should-be' approach of this book. Nevertheless, if you wish to understand the icons as sought to be depicted, then this is your book.
Let me encapsulate the contents as briefly as possible, just to give you some idea about the scope of this book.
Volume I Part I:
- Technical Terms
- Ganapati
- Vishnu
- Garuda and Ayudha-Purushas
Volume I Part II:
- Adityas and Navagrahas
- Devi
- Parivaradevatas
- Uttama Dasa-tala measure (ratios and proporotions of various body-parts)
Volume II Part I:
- Siva
- Lingas
- Various other forms of Siva
Volume II Part II:
- Misc. aspects of Siva
- Bhaktas, Kshetrapalas and Brahma
- Dikpalas, Asvinidevatas and Demo-Gods
Not only descriptions and names, but this book also contains numerous stories as well as local variants that must have been incredibly difficult to come by in thos epre-internet ancient age. Going through these volumes one can only bow as low as possible for the genius and labour of the author.
If you are a student of history and/or have a modicum of interest in iconography, this book is a must-read.
Highly recommended.
There have been several works since then. We have had Jitendra N. Bannerjee's monumental yet sceptical work. We have had works in other languages which have described iconography 'as-it-is' instead of following the 'as-it-should-be' approach of this book. Nevertheless, if you wish to understand the icons as sought to be depicted, then this is your book.
Let me encapsulate the contents as briefly as possible, just to give you some idea about the scope of this book.
Volume I Part I:
- Technical Terms
- Ganapati
- Vishnu
- Garuda and Ayudha-Purushas
Volume I Part II:
- Adityas and Navagrahas
- Devi
- Parivaradevatas
- Uttama Dasa-tala measure (ratios and proporotions of various body-parts)
Volume II Part I:
- Siva
- Lingas
- Various other forms of Siva
Volume II Part II:
- Misc. aspects of Siva
- Bhaktas, Kshetrapalas and Brahma
- Dikpalas, Asvinidevatas and Demo-Gods
Not only descriptions and names, but this book also contains numerous stories as well as local variants that must have been incredibly difficult to come by in thos epre-internet ancient age. Going through these volumes one can only bow as low as possible for the genius and labour of the author.
If you are a student of history and/or have a modicum of interest in iconography, this book is a must-read.
Highly recommended.
November 28, 2019
Brilliant book. So many photography with details.
August 19, 2025
T.A. Gopinatha Rao’s Elements of Hindu Iconography is one of those books that sits at the origin point of a whole discipline—dense, meticulous, old-school, but also strangely alive, because what he was trying to do was nothing less than map the divine forms of Hinduism in their visual detail.
First published between 1914 and 1916, in two volumes spread across four parts, it became the English-language handbook for identifying deities, parsing attributes, and setting out the canons of measurement and form.
Reading it today, you see both the brilliance and the blind spots. On the one hand, Rao was systematically cataloguing a world that had not yet been put into this kind of reference form in English; on the other, he sometimes looked at gods with a Victorian squint, trying to fit them into Christian or classical European frames of comparison. That tension makes it fascinating reading even a century later.
The first volume opens with general principles—why Hindus worship images, what sort of symbolic language is employed, what measurements and proportions govern the construction of icons, and how gestures and postures carry meaning.
Rao is interested in the machinery of representation: the tālamāna system that sets out body ratios, the codification of mudrās, and the standard āsanas. He wants to show how iconography is not haphazard ornament but a rigorously textual, canonical tradition.
From there he moves into the major gods: Ganapati with his elephant head, playful and fearsome at once, detailed in the number of his arms, the arrangement of his weapons, and his vāhana mouse always hovering at his feet; Vishnu, not just in his overarching four-armed form but in the intricate variations of his twenty-four mūrtis, each distinguished by the sequence of conch, discus, mace, and lotus in the deity’s hands; and of course the avatāras, from Matsya and Kūrma through to Krishna and Rama, each described with textual references and sculptural examples. Garuḍa appears next, sometimes a bird, sometimes anthropomorphic, often treated as Vishnu’s personified vehicle, along with the whole idea of āyudha-puruṣas, weapons imagined as attendant figures in their own right.
The second part of the first volume ranges wider, from the planetary deities and solar gods to the goddess tradition. The Adityas, who personify solar functions, and the Navagrahas, planetary lords with precise iconographic markers, are mapped one by one: Surya with his chariot and seven horses, Shani always dark and ominous, and Rahu and Ketu represented with serpentine features.
Then come the Devi figures—Lakṣmī seated on a lotus, Sarasvatī with her veena, Durgā riding the lion in her martial aspect, Kali dark and garlanded with skulls. Here Rao is less interpretive than descriptive, his eye on what the texts say and what the sculptures show. Around them cluster the parivāra-devatās, attendant and subsidiary figures, and finally he devotes a section to proportion itself, the mathematics of beauty that underlies the art.
Volume two turns to Śiva and his sprawling world of forms. Rao lays out the basic Shaiva cult background before diving into linga and liṅgodbhava imagery, then into the kaleidoscope of Shiva manifestations—Chandraśekhara with the crescent moon, Dakṣiṇāmūrti as the silent teacher, Kaṅkālamūrti carrying the skeleton, Bhikṣāṭana wandering as the mendicant, and the fierce Pāśupata forms bristling with weaponry. He catalogues these like an archaeologist making field notes, text in one hand, inscription in the other.
The second part of this volume expands outward again, moving through Subrahmaṇya or Kartikeya with his spear and peacock, Nandi the bull and his personified forms, Chandesha as the child devotee who becomes a god, Kṣetrapālas as guardians of temple space, and the hybrid Harihara-pūtra. He brings in Brahmā, the neglected creator with his four faces, the Dikpālas who guard the directions, and the yakṣas, nāgas, and demi-gods that populate the Indian sacred landscape.
The appendices contain translated textual extracts in Sanskrit and Tamil on parivāra-devatās, measurement systems, and rules for deity images, showing how closely he wanted to bind practice to its scriptural ground.
Running through both volumes are plates, line drawings, and photographs—about 282 images in total—that anchor the descriptions. Rao was not content to quote Puranas or Silpa texts alone; he wanted visual proof from temple sculpture and inscriptional evidence from Chola and Pallava sites. His comparative method is basic but effective: note how a Vishnu icon in Drāviḍa style differs from one in Nāgara and how a South Indian inscription confirms a form described in the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa. It is empirical scholarship, even when slightly stiff.
Where Rao stands out is in sheer systematisation. Before him, there wasn’t a comprehensive English guidebook to Hindu iconography. After him, you had a reference text you could use if you were a curator confronted with a bronze whose attributes you needed to decode, or an archaeologist working in a temple field. His work created a baseline for iconography as a discipline distinct from art history or archaeology per se. He preserved inscriptive data that later generations might not have had such easy access to. In that sense, he is to iconography what Monier-Williams is to Sanskrit lexicography: flawed in parts, coloured by his time, but indispensable as a starting point.
But what Rao does not really do is interpret. His eye is on classification, not on symbolism in the deeper metaphysical sense. When he describes Shiva as Nataraja, he lists the gestures, the drum, the fire, and the dwarf underfoot. He doesn’t wax lyrical about cosmic rhythm or the metaphysics of dance.
That move was left to Ananda Coomaraswamy, who made Shiva’s dance the heartbeat of the universe, or Stella Kramrisch, who could read a temple plan as a mandala of creation and dissolution. Coomaraswamy is interested in spiritual symbolism, in what these forms mean beyond their physical traits, and in how the lotus or the conch or the serpent embodies timeless metaphysical principles.
Rao, by contrast, tells you how many petals are supposed to be on that lotus according to the Silparatna, and what ratio the trunk of Ganesha should have to his belly. Both approaches are valid, but they speak to different needs: Rao the classifier, Coomaraswamy the interpreter.
Later scholars like Doris Srinivasan add still more nuance, taking Rao’s foundational catalogue and building layers of contextual, regional, and comparative meaning. Where Rao was predominantly South Indian in his material—Chola bronzes, Pallava temples, Drāviḍa traditions—later studies reached more evenly across India, looking at Eastern and Northeastern variants, tantric influences, and folk forms that his work leaves in the margins. His colonial context is always there too: at times he compares Hindu imagery to Christian symbols, sometimes with the awkwardness of someone trying to make the material more palatable to a Western readership.
The discipline has since moved away from that, but one must admit that without his pioneering compilation the field might have had a much slower start in English.
So the contrast is clear. Rao’s Elements is like a field manual, cataloguing attributes, forms, canons, and inscriptions—precise, often dry, but reliable.
Coomaraswamy, Kramrisch, and their heirs take those descriptions and breathe cosmic meaning into them, connecting icon to myth, myth to philosophy, and philosophy to lived ritual and art. One is a Swiggy filter telling you exactly what’s on the menu; the other is the food influencer explaining why the flavours matter, how they interact, and what story they tell.
Even with his limitations, Rao remains the foundation. To identify, you go to him; to interpret, you go beyond him. And that interplay—between the descriptive and the symbolic, the catalogue and the commentary—still shapes Hindu iconographic studies today.
First published between 1914 and 1916, in two volumes spread across four parts, it became the English-language handbook for identifying deities, parsing attributes, and setting out the canons of measurement and form.
Reading it today, you see both the brilliance and the blind spots. On the one hand, Rao was systematically cataloguing a world that had not yet been put into this kind of reference form in English; on the other, he sometimes looked at gods with a Victorian squint, trying to fit them into Christian or classical European frames of comparison. That tension makes it fascinating reading even a century later.
The first volume opens with general principles—why Hindus worship images, what sort of symbolic language is employed, what measurements and proportions govern the construction of icons, and how gestures and postures carry meaning.
Rao is interested in the machinery of representation: the tālamāna system that sets out body ratios, the codification of mudrās, and the standard āsanas. He wants to show how iconography is not haphazard ornament but a rigorously textual, canonical tradition.
From there he moves into the major gods: Ganapati with his elephant head, playful and fearsome at once, detailed in the number of his arms, the arrangement of his weapons, and his vāhana mouse always hovering at his feet; Vishnu, not just in his overarching four-armed form but in the intricate variations of his twenty-four mūrtis, each distinguished by the sequence of conch, discus, mace, and lotus in the deity’s hands; and of course the avatāras, from Matsya and Kūrma through to Krishna and Rama, each described with textual references and sculptural examples. Garuḍa appears next, sometimes a bird, sometimes anthropomorphic, often treated as Vishnu’s personified vehicle, along with the whole idea of āyudha-puruṣas, weapons imagined as attendant figures in their own right.
The second part of the first volume ranges wider, from the planetary deities and solar gods to the goddess tradition. The Adityas, who personify solar functions, and the Navagrahas, planetary lords with precise iconographic markers, are mapped one by one: Surya with his chariot and seven horses, Shani always dark and ominous, and Rahu and Ketu represented with serpentine features.
Then come the Devi figures—Lakṣmī seated on a lotus, Sarasvatī with her veena, Durgā riding the lion in her martial aspect, Kali dark and garlanded with skulls. Here Rao is less interpretive than descriptive, his eye on what the texts say and what the sculptures show. Around them cluster the parivāra-devatās, attendant and subsidiary figures, and finally he devotes a section to proportion itself, the mathematics of beauty that underlies the art.
Volume two turns to Śiva and his sprawling world of forms. Rao lays out the basic Shaiva cult background before diving into linga and liṅgodbhava imagery, then into the kaleidoscope of Shiva manifestations—Chandraśekhara with the crescent moon, Dakṣiṇāmūrti as the silent teacher, Kaṅkālamūrti carrying the skeleton, Bhikṣāṭana wandering as the mendicant, and the fierce Pāśupata forms bristling with weaponry. He catalogues these like an archaeologist making field notes, text in one hand, inscription in the other.
The second part of this volume expands outward again, moving through Subrahmaṇya or Kartikeya with his spear and peacock, Nandi the bull and his personified forms, Chandesha as the child devotee who becomes a god, Kṣetrapālas as guardians of temple space, and the hybrid Harihara-pūtra. He brings in Brahmā, the neglected creator with his four faces, the Dikpālas who guard the directions, and the yakṣas, nāgas, and demi-gods that populate the Indian sacred landscape.
The appendices contain translated textual extracts in Sanskrit and Tamil on parivāra-devatās, measurement systems, and rules for deity images, showing how closely he wanted to bind practice to its scriptural ground.
Running through both volumes are plates, line drawings, and photographs—about 282 images in total—that anchor the descriptions. Rao was not content to quote Puranas or Silpa texts alone; he wanted visual proof from temple sculpture and inscriptional evidence from Chola and Pallava sites. His comparative method is basic but effective: note how a Vishnu icon in Drāviḍa style differs from one in Nāgara and how a South Indian inscription confirms a form described in the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa. It is empirical scholarship, even when slightly stiff.
Where Rao stands out is in sheer systematisation. Before him, there wasn’t a comprehensive English guidebook to Hindu iconography. After him, you had a reference text you could use if you were a curator confronted with a bronze whose attributes you needed to decode, or an archaeologist working in a temple field. His work created a baseline for iconography as a discipline distinct from art history or archaeology per se. He preserved inscriptive data that later generations might not have had such easy access to. In that sense, he is to iconography what Monier-Williams is to Sanskrit lexicography: flawed in parts, coloured by his time, but indispensable as a starting point.
But what Rao does not really do is interpret. His eye is on classification, not on symbolism in the deeper metaphysical sense. When he describes Shiva as Nataraja, he lists the gestures, the drum, the fire, and the dwarf underfoot. He doesn’t wax lyrical about cosmic rhythm or the metaphysics of dance.
That move was left to Ananda Coomaraswamy, who made Shiva’s dance the heartbeat of the universe, or Stella Kramrisch, who could read a temple plan as a mandala of creation and dissolution. Coomaraswamy is interested in spiritual symbolism, in what these forms mean beyond their physical traits, and in how the lotus or the conch or the serpent embodies timeless metaphysical principles.
Rao, by contrast, tells you how many petals are supposed to be on that lotus according to the Silparatna, and what ratio the trunk of Ganesha should have to his belly. Both approaches are valid, but they speak to different needs: Rao the classifier, Coomaraswamy the interpreter.
Later scholars like Doris Srinivasan add still more nuance, taking Rao’s foundational catalogue and building layers of contextual, regional, and comparative meaning. Where Rao was predominantly South Indian in his material—Chola bronzes, Pallava temples, Drāviḍa traditions—later studies reached more evenly across India, looking at Eastern and Northeastern variants, tantric influences, and folk forms that his work leaves in the margins. His colonial context is always there too: at times he compares Hindu imagery to Christian symbols, sometimes with the awkwardness of someone trying to make the material more palatable to a Western readership.
The discipline has since moved away from that, but one must admit that without his pioneering compilation the field might have had a much slower start in English.
So the contrast is clear. Rao’s Elements is like a field manual, cataloguing attributes, forms, canons, and inscriptions—precise, often dry, but reliable.
Coomaraswamy, Kramrisch, and their heirs take those descriptions and breathe cosmic meaning into them, connecting icon to myth, myth to philosophy, and philosophy to lived ritual and art. One is a Swiggy filter telling you exactly what’s on the menu; the other is the food influencer explaining why the flavours matter, how they interact, and what story they tell.
Even with his limitations, Rao remains the foundation. To identify, you go to him; to interpret, you go beyond him. And that interplay—between the descriptive and the symbolic, the catalogue and the commentary—still shapes Hindu iconographic studies today.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews