Description

The caption in the top right corner says: garbha haraṇa – ‘the removal of the embryo’. It has been written twice.

On the left, a lady is on her couch in her bedroom. It is the brahmin woman Devānandā, in whom the embryo of Mahāvīra first took shape. On the right side is Hariṇaigameṣin, the commander-in-chief of the god Śakra. As is usual, he is shown with the face of an antelope, after which he is named.

Obeying his divine master’s command, Hariṇaigameṣin has gone to Devānandā’s house to remove Mahāvīra‘s embryo from her womb. This is because future great men such as Jinas cannot be born of a brahmin mother. Now he is leaving with the embryo in his hands.

The long protruding eye is a typical feature of Western Indian painting. Its origin is unclear.

Other visual elements

The original paper has been pasted onto a new base. As with many Kalpa-sūtra manuscripts, there is a clear intention to make the manuscript a valuable and remarkable object in itself. This aim is signalled by the:

  • use of gold in the paintings, margins and ornamental motifs
  • decorated border with blue floral motifs
  • single diamond filled with gold ink and surrounded by blue ornamental motifs.

The golden diamond in the centre is a symbolic reminder of the way in which manuscripts were bound at one time. Strings through one or more holes in the paper were used to thread together the loose folios so the reader could turn them over easily. The shape is in one of the places where the holes would once have been.

One diamond means a recto side.

Script

The elaborate script used is the Jaina Devanāgarī script, which is here like calligraphy. It is used for writing numerous Indian languages, here for Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit.

There are a few notable features of this script, which:

  • is an old type in the way the sounds e and o are notated when used with a consonant, known as pṛṣṭhamātrā script
  • contains red vertical lines that mark out verse divisions, with a single line dividing a verse in two while double lines are found at the end of the verse.

The lines in smaller script above and below the main text and in the margins are explanations in Sanskrit of phrases found in the central part. The two small parallel lines like slanted = after the words are meant to separate the explanations.