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The lions at Arjuna’s Penance

About the presence of lions in eastern and southern India, reader Theodore Baskaran, a well-known authority on flora and fauna, writes that “Patna from where Ashoka ruled 2,300 years ago was very much lion country.” In fact, he adds, lions were found around Delhi in the 1850s. He feels that the frequent references to the lion in ancient Tamil literature, the Kural describing the gait of a lion, and three lions being part of the bird- and animal-populated bas relief Arjuna’s Penance in Mamallapuram would all indicate the existence of the lion in South India. He thinks the lion became extinct in South India about a thousand years ago.

My Australian correspondent, however, sends me a letter he received from Prof. Sadao Takagi of Hokkaido University, Japan, in which the professor writes, “The stone-made lions you saw in Japan (Miscellany, March 24) are called Koma Inu… In Japan, it is generally said that Koma Inu, though much modified, represents lion and that it originated in ancient Egypt-Babylonia-Assyria cultural circles.” With Koma referring to Korea, it might have reached Japan through Korea. He adds, “For a long time, Japan was at the eastern end of the world and she was the terminal station, so to speak, of cultural trains from western areas, often one-way trains.”

Several readers responding to reader Pradeep Chakravarthy’s Indo-Cambodian connection (Miscellany, March 31) feel that the brick-and-granite temple construction and the name Varma(n) are all more likely to be South Indian influence on Cambodia than the other way. This is a view reflected in Krishnaswamy Associates’ Indian Imprints, an 18-episode English documentary that is being screened every Sunday morning (starting yesterday) on Doordarshan India and which will air on Doordarshan National some months later. In the picturesque and fascinating serial (glimpses of which I have seen), S. Krishnaswamy takes you through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia and shows viewers the Indian influence in these countries to be seen in temples, festivals and dances.

And Reader R. Narasimhan writes that Pahlavi was the language evolved by the Sassanians and is “sometimes called Pali”.

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