Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Ganesha
Not on view
This is the largest seated Ganesha preserved from any Cham territory and, along with the standing Ganesha found in temple E5 at My Son (cat. no. 100), demonstrates the stature of the Ganesha cult in the Shaiva world of the early Cham heartland. In pre-tenth-century Southeast Asia, Ganesha was almost universally represented without a crown; this work is the only known exception. His elephant features are sensitively and naturalistically rendered and blend seamlessly into the anthropomorphic figure beneath. He also displays a rare feature, soon forgotten, the horseradish (mulakakanda), which recalls Ganesha’s likely ancestry in early India as a god of agriculture.
cat. no. 101
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