The great Varaha relief carved into the rock face at Udayagiri in central India, one of the most celebrated surviving images of the boar avatar, has been the subject of sustained art-historical analysis connecting it directly to the specific political circumstances of the Gupta empire under which it was carved, generally dated to around 400 CE during or shortly after the reign of Chandragupta II, one of the most powerful Gupta emperors, whose military campaigns are understood to have significantly expanded Gupta territory and authority across northern and central India.
Scholars including the art historian Michael Willis have argued that the panel's imagery, Varaha triumphantly lifting the rescued earth-goddess from the depths, functioned not only as religious narrative but as a deliberate piece of political messaging, casting the Gupta emperor's own territorial conquests and consolidation of a fragmented landscape in the mythic terms of Vishnu's cosmic rescue of the earth, an equation between imperial military success and divine restoration that served the dynasty's claims to legitimate, providentially sanctioned rule. Udayagiri as a whole functioned as an important Gupta-period religious site, with several other caves and inscriptions there tied to the courtly culture of the period, and the Varaha panel's placement and scale is generally read as reflecting deliberate imperial patronage rather than an anonymous local commission. This reading does not reduce the panel to mere propaganda devoid of religious content, both readings, cosmic rescue myth and political statement, are understood to operate simultaneously in a work of this kind, but it illustrates how thoroughly Gupta-period elite religious art could be woven into the dynasty's own political self-presentation.