power but less technical refinement, we can gather that Bhairava is engaged in the destruction of the demon Ratnāsura, assisted by Kālī, who is shown as a grim and gaunt ogress armed with a sacrificial knife: Parvati, Siva's Himālayan bride, looking on worshipfully at the awful manifestation of the Great God's tāmasic powers. The Ellora temple can be approximately dated about the beginning of the eighth century. The Elephanta sculpture is perhaps a century earlier.
Parvati herself, under the name of Dūrgā the Inaccessible, also assists in the constant struggle of the gods with the powers of darkness, her chief opponent being a buffalo-demon, Mahisura, who caused much trouble in the heavenly regions. This is the subject of the great sculpture from Java now in the Ethnographic Museum at Leyden (Pl. LXVI, b), in which Dūrgā striding over the carcass of the dead buffalo is seizing the demon which comes out of its head in the form of a curly-headed dwarf. The same subject is also very powerfully treated in one of the Māmallapuram reliefs (Cave XXXII).
An important chapter in South Indian sculpture is filled with the images representing the bhakti phase of the Saiva cult, by which the Brahmans of the south tried to combat the influence of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Jainism, and Vaishnavism. These are the idealised portrait statuettes of the Saiva teachers who from the sixth to the ninth centuries carried on a great popular propaganda and won as much veneration in the south as the Vedic Rishis or the Arahats of Buddhism. There are many popular legends still current of their devoted lives and of the miracles performed by them. The sculptors of the Chola period made many fine images of these canonised
