Varaha; Sculpture, copper alloy, India

'Once again the identity depends on how the head appears- is it a boar or bear? He has only two arms, holding a conch and chakra at his waist and stands on a well modelled lotus above a flat square that looks designed to fit a larger shrine. The pose is not typical of Rama and this could be a bear attendant from a Rama shrine.'
The standing figure of Varaha stands looking slightly to his left on a lotus pedestal on a plain square base.

Transferred from the India Museum in London to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1879. The India Museum Slips number this figure as 301 and state it came from the 'McKenzie Collection'. Colonel Colin Mackenzie was a British antiquarian who completed a major survey of the Mysore kingdom in southern India and became the first Surveyor General of India in 1815. Born in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Mackenzie travelled to India in 1783 as an Infantry cadet in the 78th Seaforth Highlanders but in 1786 transferred to become an Engineer in the Madras Army. He spent the remainder of his life in Asia, much of it in southern India, where he carried out a survey of the Nizam of Hyderabad's Dominions (1792-8) and the Mysore Survey (1799-1810), although he also worked in other parts of India and in Java (1811-13). He died in Calcutta in 1821.

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