Lajja
2026
Lajja, 2026A contemporary reincarnation of the Indian fertility goddess Lajja Gauri — a figure that colonial archaeologists catalogued as "heathen eroticism." While the symbolism of the squat and the lotus head remain, this avatar stages a deliberate shift in Lajja’s own iconographic grammar: the slit of the vulva, presented across two millennia of Lajja Gauri imagery, is displaced upward here, relocating the idealized birth canal to a vertical incision across the belly, indicative of an emergency C-section.
Lajja Gauri, 10th century CE, AlampurLajja Gauri, 6-9th century CE, NepalLajja Gauri, 6th century CE, Madhya Pradesh