This statue of Umamaheshvara shows Shiva (Maheshvara, ‘The Great Lord’) seated in a relaxed pose with his consort, Uma. They sit together on a cushion draped with Shiva’s tiger skin, Shiva facing forward while the smaller Uma sits beside him, leaning slightly inwards towards him, her head tilted upwards. Uma is dressed in the divine decorations of bracelets, armlets, round earrings, necklace of beads or pearls and a one-leaf diadem, with her hair in two buns. Her husband is less conventionally coifed; he has his hair up in the piled braids of the sadhu, adorned by the moon, and he wears a snake in his right ear. These are marks of the renunciant mendicant sadhus (noble ones) who still roam India in emulation of Shiva himself. But, as is typical in the Nepalese sculptural tradition, the outward signs of his sannyasin status are belied by his lordly carriage and subdued gems such as the single diadem buried in his locks and the jewelled necklace. The sculpture thus hints at Shiva’s renegade status as a semi-outcaste mendicant, while clearly expressing his role as Lord of the World or Great Lord. The design of the lord and his lady that we see in this small sculpture is found in much the same composition in a few other bronzes and as the central focus of several fabulously carved stone treatments of this theme, which are among the finest Nepalese sculptures known.

The divine couple of Shiva and his consort is a favourite theme of Nepalese Hindu art and religious observance. Shiva’s beloved is known to the faithful in various guises as Parvati, Devi, or Satidevi, Parvati’s predecessor. Satidevi and Parvati are memorialized in the tale of the Swasthani, the month-long reading of which is a very popular observance among Hindu Newars.
This story recounts with humour and drama the relationship of the divine couple. In a scene where the frustrated Satidevi defies her controlling husband by taking the form of the terrible dashamahavidya goddesses, the equality of power between the male and female elements of this divine relationship is made abundantly clear, an equality that is largely carried through into Newar social structure.

This Umamaheshvara has the patina and marks of an excavated find. The heavy green patina and relatively rough surface seem consistent with being buried or stored underground for a long period of time. Excavated sculptures are relatively rare from Nepal, where bronzes have been buried only by accident; but several other examples are known.1

1 See the Ardhanarishvara in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pal, 1974, no. 150. Also an eleventhcentury Umamaheshvara in Lerner & Kossak, 1991, no. 113.