Lajja

2026

Lajja, 2026

Statement—
A contemporary reincarnation of the Indian fertility goddess Lajja Gauri — a figure that colonial archaeologists catalogued as "heathen eroticism." While the symbolism of the squat and the lotus head remain, this avatar stages a deliberate shift in Lajja’s own iconographic grammar: the classic slit of the vulva, a unifying feature across two millennia of Lajja Gauri imagery, is displaced upward — relocated from the idealized birth canal to a vertical incision across the belly, open and unsutured, indicative of an emergency C-section.

Lajja Gauri, 10th century CE, Alampur

Lajja Gauri, 6-9th century CE, Nepal

Lajja Gauri, 6th century CE, Madhya Pradesh