HC concludes “idol which was recovered in excavation and is claimed to be in British Museum in London is of Goddess Saraswati”. Other names exist too.
When the Madhya Pradesh High Court at Indore declared the Bhojshala complex in Dhar “a temple of Goddess Vagdevi (Saraswati)”, at the centre of this declaration was an idol. But where that idol is, what it depicts, and how it can be put back at the complex, are questions that remain.

Idol in the British Museum
According to the 242-page judgment, the Hindu petitioners said that in 1875, during British rule, Major General William Kincaid, a political agent of the colonial government, excavated the complex — known for years as the Bhojshala-Kamal Maula Mosque complex — and that an idol of Goddess Vagdevi was found.

The petitioners’ evidence noted that the idol was subsequently kept in a museum in England. The dates of its transit to London — reaching the museum in 1886 and formally entering its collection in 1909 — are also part of the museum’s records.

The British Museum’s description of the sculpture reads: “Standing figure of the Jaina yakṣiṇī Ambikā carved in a coarse white marble.” The museum classifies it as a Jain idol. It is around four feet tall and weighs about 250 kg.
“The goddess, originally four-armed, is carved in high relief against the plain ground of the slab; the base has been given offsets and is inscribed. The goddess wears a tiered crown of the beehive (karaṇḍa) type with her long hair tied into a small bun on one side. Two arms of the goddess have been broken away; in the remaining arms, she holds an elephant goad (aṅkuśa) and what seems to be the bottom of a noose or the stalk of a plant,” reads the the museum note.
What the idol is called, and by whom
The sculpture has been called by different names by different people. The judgment records that OC Gangoly, a celebrated art historian, and KN Dikshit, a former director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, had published a joint study announcing it was “Raja Bhoja’s Sarasvatī from Dhār”.

That identification was contested from the 1980s. One of the petitioners also cited a study of the inscription by HC Bhayani, a well-known Sanskrit and Prakrit scholar, published in 1981, who concluded the sculpture was of Ambika, a Jain goddess. Michael Willis, curator at the British Museum, presented the same reading at the 13th Jaina Studies Workshop at SOAS in London on March 18, 2011, as cited by petitioners. The British Museum’s current official classification follows Willis’s reading.

Hindu devotees and the petitioners in this case have consistently called it Vagdevi or Saraswati.