Brahma of Goa

Over the last few weeks, as a part of my participation in the E-Yantra Virtual Museum competition, I have been on a journey to discover the history of one statue and its entire story. I have scoured the internet searching for leads, visited temples, talked to priests and gone around Goa to find out about this one statue. This statue is a sculpture of Brahma, a Hindu god. It is chiselled black stone and originates in the Kadamba era (12th century). It is decorated with many details, stands tall, and is bearded with Kadamba-style designs. The figure carries a ladle in its upper right Hand, The Vedas in its upper left hand. Kamandal in its lower left hand and chanting beads in its lower right hand. 

Now let me walk you through my story about this statue.

First, I saw images of the statue and then tried searching for information on it online. I found a few excellent articles, but those still wouldn’t give the full details. After a lot of scouring around the internet, I found one article which talked about the statue in detail. After reading this article, I realised how much history this one statue had and its importance. 

First of all, can you remember visiting any temple dedicated to Brahma?

No? Then that is because there are only three known temples of Brahma in India! One is located in Rajasthan at Pushkar, which is very famous, and another one is at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh and the one in the topic.

The reason for this is that in the Puranas, it said that Lord Shiva of the Trimurti cursed Brahma that his idol would never be worshipped.

This is why it is surprising that there is a temple of Brahma in Goa!

Watch this video that I have created, which explains the details of the brahma temple in Goa.

As a part of the project, I took a lot of photographs of the statue so that I could take photogrammetry of it and get a 3d model of it. Eventually, I got the 3d model and used a blender to clean it up. After that, I made a small display for it in Blender, which looks like this:

Then I took just the 3d model and made a panning turn table of it which looks like this:

From this entire experience, I learned a lot of things and made a lot of new discoveries. I enjoyed the entire journey and was fascinated by the statute a lot.

You can read a research article by me about this topic here

Thank You for reading this post. Share it with other people to spread the journey of the Statute.