Concluding Remarks

Summary

The analysis of sculptures of ancient North India selected for this book was focused on presenting, using the medium of objects of visual sphere, the record of certain beliefs and practices related to child protection. The chosen group of characters provided sufficient arguments to recognise that this topic was undoubtedly important for those communities, which was indicated above all by the number of objects, the variety of characters who were supposed to watch over the fertility and abundance of people, as well as by the extraordinary creativity in inventing stories related to the deities. On the one hand, the sculptures of the Mathura region are for me a tangible, material documentation of ancient phenomena. Thanks to them, one can make an attempt to comprehend significant human problems by looking for specific content in the objects that people collected, observed and used. At the same time, we may grasp the achievements of this community related to a more intimate area, regarding the role of women in the family, securing its well-being and continuity, often involving magical rituals bordering on medical practices. The matters closest to man, dictated by the evolutionally conditioned extension of the species, gained an appropriate religious setting, which was recorded in descriptions of ceremonies such as sanskaras, as well as in numerous cultural narratives in which the emphasis on having children was woven into the stories of the supernatural world. Their key theme is birth, which is especially striking in the case of the Skanda tale. On the other hand, this type of material gives an opportunity to match information contained in texts with real objects. Despite the transformations or interpretations of characters such as a Matrika or a Graha after the Kushan era, it is possible to look at the older forms of supernatural beings that have been linked to diseases and threats affecting pregnant women, foetuses and newborns. Some of them functioned under names that had already been registered in the Vedic literature (e.g., Naigamesha). Despite grouping this massive army of diverse figures into groups, creating a genealogy of deities, and establishing sisterly, fraternal, parental, and marital relationships between them (which probably simply reflect human family relationships), it is difficult to achieve an ideal order and hierarchy.