This has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious one ever :)) utter innocence on three counts:

a) whether a stable form of Bali iconography exists (it doesn& #39;t)

b) how a "Christian saint like Jesus" (!) is depicted

c) most cripplingly, what native Indians really look like!

Here& #39;s a small sample of Bali iconography picked from Wikipedia. This is from Badami, Karnataka, 7th c AD, with the Bali figure highlighted on the right. Doesn& #39;t look very much like a member of the "choti and thread" club :)))

Here& #39;s another. Choti-thread? Why on earth (or sky or pataal) would they at all want to turn a Daitya king into that?

One more. Calcutta Art Studio. Which would make it 19th c Bengal (the same aesthetic zone that gave birth to the first visualised Bharat Mata, so don& #39;t diss it in a hurry).

As for the risibly sorry misidentification of a generalised Dravidian physiognomy, it can only come from an amazing bit of innocence. Here& #39;s two images of the prototype, from colonial-era ethnography. It& #39;s something all of us all over India know as part of the deepest part of us.

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