How to Read a Murti
Hindu sacred images are a precise visual language. Decode the arms, attributes, gestures, mounts and colours that name a deity, and a figure becomes readable.
A murti is a text. Every element of it is fixed by iconographic manuals and carries meaning: the number of arms, the objects held in each, the position of the hands, the animal at the feet, the colour, the posture.
A reader who knows the vocabulary can identify a figure, its school, and often its region and century from a photograph. Vishnu holds conch, discus, mace and lotus, and the order in which he holds them names the specific form. A raised palm means the same thing across two thousand years of sculpture.
The manuals are precise about this. The Shilpa Shastras and the Agamas specify proportions to the fraction, and a sculptor working outside them was producing something the tradition would not install.
These pages teach the vocabulary, so that an image stops being decoration and becomes something you can read.