A section from the journey

The Mother-Goddess Figurines

Among the things the cities made are many small clay figures of women, some plain, some richly adorned. Many people read them as mothers, or as a goddess of life and plenty. The Goddess, the Devi, is deeply loved in later Hinduism. Do these little figures flow down to her, or not? We meet that open question gently.

Let us pick up, in our mind's hand, a small figure of clay. It comes from one of the cities. It is the shape of a woman. The cities left these by the hundred, and they are some of the most touching things they made.

Some of these figures are plain and simple. Others are richly made, with tall headdresses and ornaments pressed into the clay. From very early times, people on this land shaped such female forms. Many who study them read them as mothers, or as a goddess of life and plenty — though we cannot always be sure what they meant to the hands that made them.

Now here is what makes these little figures stir us. The Goddess is deeply loved in later Hinduism. She is the , honoured across the whole land in countless forms, as mother, as protector, as power itself. So when we hold a clay mother from the cities, we cannot help but wonder.

And so a question rises on its own. Do these ancient figures flow down to the later Goddess, along a long unbroken line of memory? Or were they toys, or small charms for the home, with no thread tying them to the worship that came after? This is a real debate, and a careful one. Let us step to the Threshold.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differAre the Indus female figurines an early root of the later Goddess (Devi), or need they not be goddesses at all?

What scholars find

Most scholars urge caution here. Female figurines are common across many early cultures, and they may be toys, votive offerings, or symbols of fertility as easily as images of a worshipped goddess. Because the Indus people left no text we can read, no one can prove that a particular later goddess descends straight from these clay figures. The mainstream view holds that later Hinduism is woven from many strands over a long time — some perhaps very old and indigenous, others arriving later — and that a simple, single line of descent from figurine to Devi should not be assumed. Some scholars, such as Asko Parpola, do trace a possible deep prehistory of the Goddess and connect Indus imagery to it, but as a careful possibility rather than a settled fact. All stress this is a question of images and evidence, never of race.

As the tradition holds

Some within the tradition, and some scholars, see real continuity. They read the ancient clay mothers as early forms of the Devi, the Goddess who has been loved on this land since its deepest past. To them, the abundance of these figures speaks of a living reverence for the divine mother that was never lost, but flowed down the ages and blossomed into the great Goddess worship of later Hinduism. In this reading, the spiritual life of this land grows in place, from very deep roots, and the same love returns because it was always here.

Whichever way the truth lies, one thing is worth feeling. The human heart has long turned to the mother who gives and guards life. That turning is very old, and very deep. Where it joins into one unbroken story, and where it begins again, is what we will keep asking, gently, as our road goes on.

Picture someone long ago pressing ornaments into wet clay to shape a small mother. We do not know her prayer, or whether it was a prayer at all. What do you feel, holding something so old whose meaning we can only guess?