Kamala is Lakshmi, and the identification is complete rather than partial: the tenth Mahavidya is the goddess of wealth and good fortune worshipped in more Indian households than any other, with no adjustment made to fit her into the set. Her image is the Gaja Lakshmi type. She is golden, seated or standing on a lotus, holding two lotuses, making the gestures of granting boons and of dispelling fear, and bathed by four elephants pouring water over her from pots held in their trunks.
Kamala means the lotus one, and the flower carries the whole argument of the image. It grows out of mud, is not stained by the water it rises through, and opens with the sun, so it holds together the promise of abundance and the assertion that abundance need not soil what it touches. The elephants are rain and royal power at once. The composition is among the oldest continuously used religious images in India, appearing on Buddhist railings at Bharhut and Sanchi centuries before anyone drew up a list of ten.
Within the tantric framing she keeps the ordinary functions: wealth, fertility, harvest, household stability, sovereignty. Her Vedic ancestry runs through the Sri Sukta, an appendix to the Rigveda addressing a goddess of splendour and cattle, and her largest annual moment is Diwali, when she is invited into houses that have been cleaned and lit for her. What changes in the list is not the goddess but the company she is keeping.