Rare Javanese Bronze Standing Elephant-Headed Figure, perhaps Ganesh

This very unusual cast bronze image shows a figure with an elephant’s head and a human’s body. It might be Ganesh but it is possible that it is not. There were several figures in pre-Islamic Javanese lore that had elephant heads. The example here wears what appears to be a Javanese Hindu priest’s headdress,

He stands with one foot aloft, on a hemispherical dais. He holds a ceremonial handbell (ganta) in his left hand and another attribute in his right. His trunk curls straight up and out, his ears projects at right angles from his head. Other than the tall, openwork headdress, he wears a diadem of pointy leaf motifs that might be modelled on bamboo shoots. Three similar leafy appendages rise from the dais on which the figure stands. The deity is naked other than for a sacred cord around his waist.

Standing figures of Ganesh were rare on Java and probably represent a later innovation. No standing images are known from the Classical Period (9th-12th century) of Javanese Hinduism and Buddhism. Several examples appear around the 14th and 15th centuries however, most notably, an example in stone relief at Candi Sukuh in Central Java, a temple complex dating to the 15th century, one of the last monuments of Indo-Javanese culture before the island’s conversion to Islam. This relief is the largest such relief at Candi Sukuh. The deity stands on one foot and with a trunk turning straight  up. One interpretation of the stance of Ganesh is that it is not a stance at all but rather the consequence of the deity descending from heaven (Fontein, 1990, p. 176). What is clear is that the stance of the deity on the relief is very similar to that of the bronze here.

The image has a varying green and brown patina consistent with other 1th and 15th century bronzes from central and east Java.

The statue was collected by the British travel writer and conservationist John Blower whilst living in Bogor, Indonesia, in the early 1970s.

 

Above: part of the relief at Candi Sukuh showing the standing elephant-headed figure, reproduced from Kempers (1959).