In the early 1970s, when the renowned art historian Pratapaditya Pal came to Kathmandu to research his book, The Arts of Nepal (1974), he asked Nepali artist and art historian Lain Singh Bangdel to help him identify and date a mysterious sculpture found outside Bankali. What resulted was an academic argument and the unfolding of a most unusual story.
The Bankali temple, where Pal found the stone image is in Mrigasthali, a wooded knoll on the east bank of the Bagmati river, where Lord Shiva is believed to have been seen wandering, disguised as a mriga (deer).
Pal, now a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, thought it to be a linga, but one so strange that he wrote, "…there is nothing else in Nepal or in India with which it is comparable."
The upper portion of the shaft, Pal observed, had a human head carved on it and looked as if it was emerging from a lotus flower. It rested on a jalahari, which, for a more conventional linga, serves as a base. It had a short chin, a tuft of pointed beard, tightly pursed lips, a flat nose and vacant eyes set off beneath arched eyebrows giving it a sinister expression — and from a distance, an effeminate look. His hair, curling on top and falling in long strands down the back and sides, showed him to be an ascetic.