English: Above:

Two collosal Varaha statues were present at the Eran site. The image above shows one of the two.

The above image is the one of two Eran Varaha. It is Yajna-Varaha, per early Hindu Sanskrit texts. This is one of the most published and studied statues from Eran. The statue features bands of Hindu arts, goddess earth hanging by one of the tusks, Vac or Saraswati on Varaha's lip, an important inscription below the neck and above the front legs, Saptagraha (not Navagraha), iconography and themes from Vaishnava, Shaiva and Shakta traditions of Hinduism.

The second Eran statue is of Nr-Varaha (Nara-Varaha, half-boar and half-human avatar of Vishnu). It is not in Eran anymore. It is now in Hari Singh Gaur University Museum in Sagar. It is also of sandstone and exceptional in artistic merit. It has an small inscriptions in early Gupta Brahmi script. That helped established Eran to be an active temple complex c. 4th century CE.

For more details about the above image, please see discussions in scholarly sources such as

• Catherine Becker (2010), 'Not Your Average Boar: The Colossal Varaha at Eran, Artibus Asiae, 70(1), pp. 123-149
• Haripriya Rangarajan (1997), Varaha Images in Madhya Pradesh, Somaiya Publications
• J G Williams (1982), The Art of Gupta India, Princeton University Press

Background:

Eran (ऐरण, Airan) is one of the earliest dated towns of ancient India whose monuments have survived. It is now a village located midst rolling hills, south of river Bina. It was a busy town before 600 CE, on the trading routes linking eastern kingdoms to those in west, as well as the northern to those in southwest India. The inscriptions, statues, temple remnants, mud fort, moat, and coins discovered here have been instrumental to a better understanding of ancient India. The oldest coins found here have inscriptions in Brahmi script, and these date from the 2nd century BCE. Later inscriptions are in later scripts, such as the Gupta scripts, and these call the town as Erakaya or Airaka – possibly related to the Naga-mythology of ancient Indian religions.

Some of the discoveries from Eran were moved in the 19th-century and early 20th-century to museums in India, and outside India. In the modern village of Eran, three sites remain. Of these, the most published and more frequently visited site is called "Ancient Site Eran" by ASI. The other two sites are east of the main site, closer to the village and the river. They have the famous inscription with the earliest epigraphical mention of Sati, and the remnants of another ancient Hindu temple.

The main Eran site was a large temple complex. But, almost all of that history survives as ruins and many platforms at the site. The surviving monuments include a pillar with inscription, a standing Varaha with another inscription, an anthropomorphic Narasimha (damaged legs, now lying flat), parts of a Vishnu temple, several other pillars and panels of Hindu artwork. The site has several minor inscriptions as well and a subset of ruins from lost Hindu temples.