Surjavo Sen Gupta discusses the cultural depiction of Lajjā Gaurī as a cultural antecedent to the role of male-female compatibility in Fertility Studies.
Lajjā Gaurī is an ancient Indian deity whose images were prevalent in the Indian subcontinent from the second century till the eleventh century. The name combines the Sanskrit words “lajjā” (modesty or shame) and “Gaurī” (another name for the Hindu goddess Parvati). While “lajjā” suggests modesty, the goddess is variously known by epithets like “shameless goddess” and “displayed female,” further complicating her meaning. Her images range in quality from extreme crudity to great refinement, and “are made either of moulded or hand-formed terracotta or of stone carved in relief” (Bolon 1992, 4). The best-known images of this goddess have a female torso and a lotus flower in place of a head, while she is resting on her back with her legs bent at the knees and drawn up to each side in a pose that has been described as one of “giving birth.” Also known as the uttānapada pose, this posture has drawn significant attention from Western and Indian scholars alike, leading them to attribute themes of abundance, fertility, and reproduction to the deity.
This essay shall take a small pivot from this line of thinking and build on an observation made by Carol Radcliffe Bolon (1992) in her seminal monograph on this goddess, wherein she suggests that Lajjā Gaurī’s iconography forms a composite image comprising both the female womb and the male phallus. This visual punning, I argue, gestures toward a more profound implication: the necessity of compatibility between the male and female agents involved in the process of fertilisation. This cultural knowledge shall subsequently be wielded to critique how Western, and to a greater extent, global healthcare has been prone to approach fertility ailments through siloed ‘male’ and ‘female’ rubrics, rather than attempting to understand the two in unison. The notion that infertility may result not only from individual health issues in men or women, but also from incompatibility between partners at the gamete level (i.e., between sperm and egg), is a relatively recent development in medical science.
Phallus-Womb Coupling in Lajjā Gaurī
The uttānapada pose is tremendously important for understanding why Lajjā Gaurī is associated with fertility and reproduction — this posture in fact appears consistently across all known representations of the goddess. In the Rigveda, it is stated that from Aditi (Earth) sprang Dakṣa, the spiritual potency in the universe (Kramrisch 1956, 269). Similarly, the term ‘uttānapada’ in Sanskrit means “one whose legs are extended in parturition.” However, in the case of Lajjā Gaurī, the meaning of the pose is less straightforward. Its ambiguity is likely intentional, as the posture of sexual receptivity and that of childbirth are effectively identical. In this context, the human form and the intercourse/birth pose function as a metaphor for creation. Lajjā Gaurī is therefore not merely a birth-giving goddess; the sexual act is inseparable from the imagery of fertility. Indian visual iconography, in this instance, evokes both meanings through the depiction of a single pose.
Lajjā Gaurī’s ambiguity resides not only in the uttānapada pose but also in her image total. Fertility goddesses — a good example being the Venus of Willendorf — traditionally have a prominent belly. The woman is certainly central to the process of parturition; however, male-female compatibility is also worth considering when addressing fertility issues. Bolon’s (1992) contention becomes relevant in light of the above statement: if one were to invert almost any image of Lajjā Gaurī, her pot-shaped belly appears very much like a phallus, with the slit seeming to serve as the opening of both the vagina and the penis. Viewed from the ‘head’ end, it seems that within this female body, a phallus is enclosed in the womb area. Speaking of examples, the phallus is clearly represented in late-seventh century stone images from Darasuram (Fig. 2) and Kudavelli (Fig. 3).
Similarly, two other images from Ter (Figs. 4) and Nevase (Fig. 5) give more emphasis to the figures’ upper portion, elongating the waist in a way that seems intended to suggest a rising phallus.
This composite imagery, as I shall explicate in the next section, can be viewed as a precursor to the importance now increasingly being placed on male-female compatibility within medical science as a significant dimension in reproduction and fertility processes.
Biological compatibility for fertilisation?
The article which I shall be citing is actually part of a continuing investigation that scrutinises the possibility of male-female pairing having an effect on fertility (Kekäläinen and Evans 2018; Kekäläinen 2021; Fitzpatrick et al. 2020). Traditionally, infertility has been attributed to “male factors, female factors, a combination of male and female factors or may be unexplained,” as per the World Health Organisation’s definition (n.d.). However, recent research has shown that reproductive failure may also arise from reproductive incompatibility between partners, where even healthy individuals may struggle to conceive due to interactions at the cellular level — specifically, how sperm behaves in the presence of female reproductive fluids.
One key area Łukasiewicz et al. (2022) explore is the role of female reproductive secretions like follicular fluid (FF) and female serum in influencing sperm function. These fluids appear to act as agents of “gamete-level mate choice” by modifying sperm behaviour based on compatibility. The study involved sperm from 10 male donors and both follicular fluid and serum from 6 female donors. Researchers analysed sperm motility (ability of sperm cells to move effectively), viability (percentage of live sperm cells in a semen sample), and hyperactivation (specific motility pattern that enables a sperm cell to penetrate the egg’s protective layers and fertilize it) under both treatments. Amongst the findings made in this study, the most relevant for our discussion is that the effect of both FF and serum on sperm swimming velocity and hyperactivation were strongly dependent on male-female combination, i.e., compatibility. This strongly supports the concept of biological compatibility playing a crucial role in fertility.
In this manner, the cultural knowledge inherited from the iconography of Lajjā Gaurī becomes relevant in light of the ongoing discourse in fertility studies, where the interaction between male and female gametes at the biological level is now being considered to influence fertilisation — an area that this field had previously attempted to understand in binary silos for the two sexes. Such imagery, not limited to Indian traditions, can potentially assist in viewing similar monolithic ‘truths’ in medical science through a different lens, and might even effectively deconstruct them.
About the author
Surjavo Sen Gupta (he/him) is an MA student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research focuses on the intersections of visual culture, media studies, and social history, examining how artistic and institutional frameworks interact to reflect and influence cultural consciousness.
References
Bolon, Carol R.. 1992. Forms of the Goddess Lajjā Gaurī in Indian Art. College Art Association.
Fitzpatrick, John L., Charlotte Willis, Alessandro Devigili et al. 2020. “Chemical signals from eggs facilitate cryptic female choice in humans.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 287: 20200805. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0805.
Kekäläinen, Jukka. 2021. “Genetic incompatibility of the reproductive partners: an evolutionary perspective on infertility.” Human Reproduction 36 (12): 3028-3035. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deab221.
Kekäläinen, Jukka, and Jonathan P. Evans. 2018. “Gamete-mediated mate choice: Towards a more inclusive view of sexual selection.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0836.
Kramrisch, Stella. 1956 “An Image of Aditi-Uttānapad.” Artibus Asiae 19 (3/4): 259-70. https://doi.org/10.2307/3248763.
Łukasiewicz, Aleksandra, Kari Huhta, Jarmo Ritari et al. 2022. “Sperm Physiological Response to Female Serum—Potential New Insights into the Reproductive Incompatibility Diagnostics.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 23, 3428. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms23073428.
World Health Organisation. n.d. “Infertility.” Accessed August 5, 2025. https://www.who.int/health-topics/infertility#tab=tab_1.
