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This is not so strange as it sounds; extremely decorous temples all over India have
a little niche tucked away where some pretty vigorous and unusual copulation is
depicted. Whether this is the Kailasha temple at Ellora or tiny ancient temples
in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, you can see these representations. They are totally inconspicuous,
but they are inevitably there. I have a hobby of sorts in locating them! Since the
Khajuraho temples were so magnificent and the builders had no false humility about
it, they covered the walls with this repellant-magic talisman.
And then of course we have the famous allegory explanation. Sex is a symbol of union
with God and all these representations are actually symbolic devices to help you
transcend your mundane existence. This is the escape route used to explain away
the erotic poetry of the Gita-Govindam too. In this context my favorite story is
about the visit of the great Carl Gustav Jung to the temple complex on his trip
to India. Anxiously he asked a nearby priest to explain the inner meaning, the esoteric
wisdom, of the frantically entwined couple in stone. The great man was waiting for
a ray of revelation, something that would be archetypally significant. The answer
was crisply illuminating. "Man and woman fucking."
All these explanations are a reality but none of them is the full truth.
In about 1990 however, a very sharp art historian called Dr. Shobita Punja, realized
something about Khajuraho that has altered forever our perceptions of it. She made
the connection between certain passages of the Shiva Purana, describing the marriage
of Shiva and Parvati and realized that the entire Khajuraho temples complex could
be regarded as a permanent recreation of that divine marriage. This is a gross oversimplification
of course, but space does not permit us to go into it in any great detail. This
insight led her to look anew at the temples and she has come out with a theory that
integrates the entire complex in a vast mythic recreation of divine space, rather
like the temples at Angkor Vat.
A few of the very significant points she unearthed are still worth mentioning. There
is actually a temple called the Dhuladeo Mandir or the Bridegroom Temple within
the complex. A preponderance of Shivalingas in the complex recreate the divine emergence
of the lingam when Shiva destroyed Kama, the God of Desire as mentioned in the Shiva
Purana. (The lingam represents his triumph over limitations and the snares of sensuality.)
Some of the supposedly erotic sculptures are actually illustrations of scenes depicted
in the Purana. When the divine bridegroom appears, people forget what ever they
are doing in their eagerness to look at him, a metaphor for the desire of the soul
to view God. In that rush they cease their make-up, and even forget to cover their
nakedness properly, so eager are they to avail of this rare opportunity to view
God.
 This
is the significance behind sculptures mistakenly labeled as lady removing a thorn
from her foot. The so-called thorn is the size of a little knife and she is actually
in the act of applying kohl to her feet. That is the only correct anatomical explanation
too, as the manner in which her body is twisted precludes any removal of thorns
stuck in the foot. So too a typical much repeated sculpture of a nude woman with
her clothes falling off. It is not titillation as was suspected, but the exact depiction
of the condition of one woman as mentioned in the Shiva Purana when the call rang
out that the divine bridegroom had come. To look at the groom is a very big cultural
ritual in India and it is an apt metaphor for the longing of the soul for God. She
has done some really voluminous and remarkable work and has suddenly brought the
whole Khajuraho temple complex back into the mainstream of Indian religious evolution,
rather than being a tantrik aberration.
There is also a rather quaint ritual followed every year by the Matangeshwar temple
at Khajuraho. Every year they recreate the divine wedding. One month before Maha-Shivaratri,
the head priest actually goes round to surrounding villages (nowadays on a motorcycle),
asking devotees to attend the marriage of the Lord. They even carry the customary
tokens and symbolic gifts that are handed out when invitations are given on the
occasion of normal weddings. The village of Khajuraho in fact thinks of itself as
the family of Himmavat, Parvati's father and makes preparations for the wedding
in traditional style. This includes the counting out of 110,021 grains of sacred
rice to be showered on the married couple after the marriage.
What is really amazing is that this has been going on all these years and nobody
seems to have noticed something so significant. Scholars were too busy giving exotic
explanations to look at the easily available source book of the Shiva Purana, a
living text in India even today. It has even been translated into local languages
and cassettes are available where the entire Purana is expounded. These are set
to screechy music, are atrocious in their quality of exposition and are of course
immensely popular.
This should be enough to whet your appetite to view the temples as something other
than merely an erotic zone. As to their aesthetic qualities, perhaps we will take
that up when we examine the temple art of India in the not so distant future. What
is worrying however, is that Khajuraho has become a victim of its own success. There
is an airport nearby, to ferry the many tourists and the planes seem to be vibrating
the temples more than was ever intended. The local villages too have fallen into
the trap of being a mere service-provider and hanger on to the tourists. Pollution
and the seepage of water are causing an alarming rate of cracks and other structural
damage. The response to this alarming situation is as can be expected, tepid at
best and indifferent as usual. In the rush for erotica, it is sometimes overlooked
that most of these temples are living temples with a daily flow of regular worshippers.
It would be a colossal tragedy if these monuments did not survive the new millennium
as well as they did the last.
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