Dravidian), and that this race is portraying its own women in its divinities. Noses with a markedly thin ridge, long, and set in oblong faces; thin, long arms and legs; very slender upper thighs: these are the prominent anatomical traits. And the eyes, slightly bulging, in the form of oval bubbles, resemble, according to the local metaphor, the eyes of fish. "The Fish-Eyed One," Mīnākṣī, is a favorite epithet of the goddess in South India, celebrating this much appreciated detail of beauty. The chief temple at Madura, which is one of the most magnificent examples of religious architecture in the late medieval period, is dedicated to śiva and his goddess under her name of Mīnākṣī.

The contour of the hips of the female forms greatly varies in the art of the South, sometimes following the traditional outline, emphasizing breadth and weight, sometimes exhibiting an extraordinarily slender grace, corresponding to the actual, rather delicate and slim figures of the women of the region. Such an image as that of the Pārvatī is striking for the vitality of its refined realism and its almost portraitlike vivacity. The hips show no suggestion of the traditional ideal and are as remote as possible from the usual type of the North. Consider in contrast the yakṣī. The upper part of this pillar-relief once formed part of a stone railing around a stūpa, probably built in the Kuṣāna-Amarāvatī period of the second century A.D. It depicts the balcony of a palace in the blissful realm of the yakṣas, and one sees there a divine couple-inmates of the yakṣa realm, in amorous dalliance, enjoying the sensual bliss of that paradise. Like Kubera, the king of yakṣas, this sumptuous beauty stands on a crouching human vāhana. She carries in her right hand the cage of a pet bird, and, laden with rich ornaments, wears immense anklets to mark with their tinkling the rhythm of her sensual gait. She is "burdened by the weight of her hips and thighs, and bent slightly forward with the weight of her breasts". Her walk resembles, according to constantly recurring Indian metaphors, "the gait of a swan or of a duck along the shore," also the heaving and swelling stride of an elephant as it passes, noiselessly and almost nimbly, with its massive form. In the fully blossoming body of this goddess of life-force and earthly welfare the characteristics of abundance, fertility, exuberance, and sex are emphasized. And yet she is not a mere geometrical symbol. She reflects an ideal of feminine beauty that still is evident in the living forms of women through the North of India.

The South, on the other hand, has had its own ideal. The figure shown of Pārvatī, the consort of śiva, conforms to the traditional mould; yet the long, slender limbs pay full tribute to the type of the South. The shape and expression of the face are unmistakably Southern, with the long features and thin, pointed nose; and when