Crawling figure of Bala Krishna, copper alloy, South India, 1600-1700.

The figure of a crawling child, with the left hand palm-downwards on the ground and the right hand holding a mango or lotus bud rather than a butter ball.. His headdress is an inverted tiered cone, a shape typical of figures of this type from Tamil Nadu, with the top patterned with lotus petals. He is naked except for a thin girdle which leaves the genitals exposed. He is wearing jewellery and what is probably an amulet hanging on his chest.. The figure shows substantial wear especially to the face.
This is a good quality classical southern Krishna form.
A household image especially associated with the Krishna-asthami festival.

This figure was part of the collections of the East India Company in their India Museum which were transfered to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1879. The India Museum Slips number this piece 9016 and record with a question mark that the figure came from Colonel MacKenzie. 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, in 1754, 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.

South India

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