The Devil of Calicut and the tiger-footed sage: misreading Vyāghrapāda in early European writing

Abstract

This article examines how the figure described in early European accounts as the ‘Devil of Calicut’ may reflect a European misrecognition of South Indian feline-human Shaiva imagery associated with figures such as the sage Vyāghrapāda. The arguments presented here emerged through my encounters in October 2025 with hybrid sculptural figures in temples in Tamil Nadu (India), prompting a re-examination of early modern European descriptions of South Indian religious imagery. Focusing on Ludovico di Varthema’s Itinerario (1510), one of the earliest printed European accounts of South Indian sacred forms, and on Jörg Breu’s 1515 woodcut reconstruction of the Devil of Calicut, the article explores how unfamiliar iconographic features were interpreted through early modern European visual and theological frameworks shaped by Christian demonology. Drawing on comparative visual analysis across temple sculpture, travel narrative and print imagery, it traces how meaning takes shape through encounter, description, translation and visual reconstruction across sites, materials and media. The article also traces the linguistic slippage between daivam (god) and deumo (demon), alongside the reinterpretation of tiger-footed and hybrid sacred forms linked to Vyāghrapāda as signs of monstrosity. Here, misrecognition is treated, not as an error, but as a situated interpretive practice through which unfamiliar forms were made legible within European systems of knowledge. In doing so, I position comparative visual analysis as a practice of cultural geography concerned with the movement of meaning across language, image and space.