Galerie Golconda

Wooden teak panel depicting a chubby angel wearing a “chauri”, holding a fly swatter in its left hand. The accentuated plays of the relief go hand in hand with the levels of the representation. Thus, the wings in the background are represented in a very low relief while the belly of the angel, which arrives in the foreground, is in high relief. Frieze of geometric patterns running through the lower section of the panel. These carved panels would be affixed with tenons and mortises to the base and to the top of the base of the chariot wheel.
The Indian deities of southern India would wander outside of temples in wooden chariots, whose wheels may have been made of stone (most notably in Mysore). This ancestral tradition continues to this day. The representation of angels is not unusual in Hinduism. We see their presence as invisible frames of the Universe in the religion of the 2^nd millennium BC in the Indus Valley, called Mazdaism. Thus the fly swatter is an attribute in the service of royalty, most often shown in the hands of the servants of deities.