Animal Decor

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Which animal statue is good for a home The question nearly everyone arrives with, and the honest answer is shorter than the listicles make it. Four forms carry real weight in Indian households: the elephant, the cow with her calf, the tortoise and the horse. The peacock, swan and parrot are bought for the craft more than the meaning, which is a good enough reason on its own. Showpiece, figurine, sculpture, animal idol: in India the words are used interchangeably for the same object. If you are choosing for a household you do not know well, the cow with her calf is the safe answer. It is domestic rather than devotional, so it asks nothing of the people receiving it: no puja, no place in the mandir, no assumption about which deity they keep. It sits as easily on a console as in a pooja room, and no tradition objects to it. It is also the piece we hold in the deepest quantity of anything we make, which tells you what people actually give. Where each one goes, and how much of that is real Placement advice for animal figures is convention rather than scripture, and it is worth knowing which is which before you rearrange a room around it. Elephants go in pairs near the entrance, facing into the room rather than out at the street. The cow and calf is usually put in the north or north east, and it is equally at home in the living room or the pooja room. Horses belong where work happens, a study or a desk, since the association is with speed and progress. The tortoise draws more direction questions than everything else combined, and the instruction most often given for it, north facing and sat in water, turns out to be Chinese rather than Indian. None of that comes from a text you can look up. Where an idea does have a source, we name the source. Elephants The form with the deepest attestation, and it runs through Indian art in three separate streams: Ganesha; Airavata, Indra's white elephant, named in the Bhagavad Gita; and Gaja Lakshmi, the goddess flanked by elephants, ca