by Mark Tully
Today, many visitors to Khajuraho still leer at the erotic temple carvings and perhaps all too few trouble to wonder what the erotica might really be trying to communicate to us. There have, however, been various theories put forward over the years about these and similar images. I remember being told that erotic carvings on a temple in Kathmandu were theological lightning conductors, there to ward off the evil eye. Another interpretation often heard is that Khajuraho’s carvings represent yogic practices. Some say they represent the stage of life at which a person completes the period of compulsory celibacy required of a student and is allowed – in fact enjoined – to enjoy kama. But why would the carvings only represent that stage? Why, for instance, wouldn’t they represent the stage in old age when we are told that we should retire to the forest, become an ascetic and meditate? After all, Shiva, the god of Khajuraho, was a great ascetic. Someone has even suggested that the erotic carvings on the part of the wall that joins the sanctuary to the rest of the temple represent a pun set in stone. They celebrate the joining of male and female which is required for human creativity.
For me, art historian Shobita Punja’s explanation is the most plausible. In her book Divine Ecstacy: The Story of Khajuraho she suggests that the temples and their carvings are the expression of the consummation of the divine wedding – the union of Shiva and Parvati. When Burt stumbled on the temples in 1838 there was only one building that he was not permitted to enter by his Hindu guides. This was probably because it was the only temple still used for active worship. Indeed, it remains a popular temple. It is dedicated to Shiva, and the biggest festival of the year in Khajuraho is the celebration of Shiva’s wedding to Parvati on the occasion of Mahashivratri, the great night of Shiva, which falls around the end of February.
Some years ago I went to the festival with Shobita Punja. The village of Khajuraho was packed with pilgrims from the surrounding countryside. Whole families, from great grandparents down to new babies, had travelled to the festival in carts pulled by the diminutive bullocks of the region. They had brought with them their pots, pans, stores and everything else necessary for an overnight stay, and set up camp by the roadside and on every inch of public land. Some families had come to do business. They sat on the roadside with their goods for sale spread out before them. Many were selling items required for worship, such as vermilion, small brown coconuts, pots for the ritual of pouring water, and sweets.
Shobita and I arrived at the temple early on the morning of the moonless night of the festival because I wanted to have a sacred thread tied round my wrist as a token of the occasion. Even then, we found the steep steps leading up the temple crowded with devotees. Inside the sanctuary, a stream of them wound slowly round the narrow passage surrounding the massive linga shouting ‘Hara Hara Mahadev!’ This linga, Shiva’s symbol, is a circular pillar about eight feet high and three foot six inches in diameter that almost touches the roof of the sanctuary. Tradition has it that the linga emerged by itself and would have burst through the roof and gone on growing for ever if the Raja of Khajuraho had not hammered a nail into the top of it to prevent it gaining any more height!
Everyone wanted to have a darshan, or sight, of the god, and to worship him by pouring water on the linga. As Shobita had spent a lot of time in Khajuraho, she knew the priest sitting cross-legged at the foot of the linga and he readily agreed to tie my thread. While he was doing so and reciting Sanskrit prayers, an over-enthusiastic pilgrim threw water over the linga so energetically that it splashed him. He turned round and shouted a crude swear word at the pilgrim before completing my short ceremony as though nothing had happened. In their worship Hindus do not have any place for the sacred silence and solemn whispers of Christian churches; they believe that worship should involve life as it is. So the preliminaries for the wedding of Shiva and Parvati have to be celebrated as boisterously as any village wedding.
The actual marriage ceremony takes place at night and is a replica of a modern wedding. The bridegroom’s procession, or barat, sets off from the temple priest’s house to the accompaniment of a brass band playing not religious music but hits from Bollywood movies. The bridegroom is represented by a huge, conical crown, or mukut, sitting on top of an Ambassador car. It is followed by chanting Brahmin priests. Behind them come village women singing their traditional wedding songs. Inside the temple, the Brahmins take their places around the linga. The crown is placed on top of the linga, which by this time has been washed and decorated like a bridegroom with a new dhoti wrapped round its middle, a sacred thread over what would be its chest and the three horizontal marks of a Shiva devotee smeared across what would be its brow. Beside this symbol of Shiva, Parvati is represented by a tiny image buried in a mass of flower garlands. The senior priest’s son plays the dual role of chief of Shiva’s wedding procession and head of the bride’s family. He offers gifts to the teams of Brahmins who conduct the nuptial ceremonies that continue uninterrupted until dawn.
For Shobita, the union of Shiva and Parvati represents ‘the ultimate goal of life’. It symbolises the unity of all opposites, and in particular the unity of male and female in nature, and the male and female within us. (Freud and Jung both argue that humans are inherently bisexual.) For Shobita, the temples of Khajuraho are not to be ogled at; they are sermons in stone, teaching us that sex is not to be suppressed nor to be treated purely as a recreation – which is the way it is sometimes described in the West today. Rather, sex is an act of profound significance.
The myth of the courtship and marriage of Shiva and Parvati seems to me to have something profound to say about romantic love. Because of the West’s sexual permissiveness an excessive premium is placed on ‘being in love’. As there are now far fewer social and religious restraints on making and breaking relationships, we in the West are far more easily tempted to believe that a commitment to a partner is only valid as long as we remain in love with that person and our love is reciprocated.
However, it might seem strange to maintain that too high a premium can be placed on being in love, and I remember how confused I was when, back in the sixties, I read that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, had said something similar. After all, the basis of Christianity is love and in the Anglican marriage service couples commit to loving each other. But there is a vital difference between being in love and loving each other, a difference described by the American analyst Robert A. Johnson in his book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love:
One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being ‘in love’.
This does not mean that we should avoid romantic love. We can’t and we shouldn’t, and the myth of Shiva and Parvati does not suggest anything different. Yet the myth does suggest that we should progress from romantic love to loving.
According to the myth, Shiva had withdrawn from the world in mourning for his wife Sati, a form of the great goddess. His absence had allowed a powerful demon to take control of the world and so the other gods went to the great goddess to appeal to her to manifest herself again and woo Shiva back. The goddess was reborn as Parvati, daughter of the mountains. She grew into an intellectually brilliant and beautiful young woman. When she decided to serve Shiva in his meditation, the gods conspired to make him fall in love with her. They sent Kama, the god of desire who – like Eros in Greek mythology – was armed with a bow and arrow. He fired an arrow at Shiva, distracting the god from his meditation and making him aware of Parvati’s attractions. In his rage at being thus disturbed, Shiva burnt up Kama with a glance from his third eye. After Kama’s death, Parvati felt she had lost all hope of marrying Shiva but was advised that she could still win him if she undertook penances. Her penances en
abled her to cleanse herself of all false pride and egotism, and when Shiva felt the time was ripe to test her, she passed the trials he set with flying colours. The two married and their thousands of years of lovemaking started. In the words of the sixth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidas:
With the day and the night the same to him
Siva spent his time making love
And he passed twenty-five years
As if it were a single night
And his thirst for the pleasures of loving
Never became any less in him
As the fire that burns below the ocean
Is never satisfied by the rolling waters.
Of course this myth contains many layers of meaning. The union of Shiva and Parvati, for example, restored balance to the universe. But the interpretation I believe is relevant here is that Shiva had to kill Kama, and that Parvati had to undergo penance in the absence of Kama in order to overcome egotistical romantic love. Only then could they be joined in creative and everlasting love, in which the ego is transcended.
However, sometimes Indians seem to go too far in decrying romantic love. I remember meeting a man who had been a member of Lord Linlithgow’s bodyguard when the latter was the Viceroy. The man said to me with a mixture of pride and scorn, ‘You people fall in love before marriage and out of love afterwards. We fall in love after marriage.’ He implied that romantic love was a dangerous diversion. But, unlike the views of the Viceroy’s bodyguard, the myth of Shiva and Parvati does not deny the importance of desire. Kama had to fire his arrow at Shiva to make him fall in love, and at the end of the story Shiva is persuaded to bring Kama to life again, so that the work of creation can continue. This myth is also one of many examples of how the Indian tradition is able to combine the sacred and the sensual, unlike either tradition or modernity in the West.
The ability to combine the sacred and the sensual has often been mistaken in the West for a licence to practise free sex. In the seventies, in his ashrams first in America and later back in India, Bhagwan Rajneesh became globally renowned for encouraging his disciples to have sex in the belief that it was a means to enlightenment. He claimed to be following Tantric practices and so it is perhaps not surprising that the Tantric school of Hinduism is widely misunderstood in the West as all about exotic sexual practices.
While making a radio programme about Tantra, I was intrigued to discover that although Tantra teaches that sex is one way through which the purest form of consciousness can be achieved, it is also a path that requires strict self-control and discipline. Madhu Khanna, a Tantric practitioner as well as a scholar of Tantric and other Sanskrit texts, agreed to be our expert for the programme on the condition that we did not concentrate on sex alone, explaining that it was but one way to achieve the purest form of consciousness and was only advocated by one of the Tantric traditions. Madhu suggested that in order to ensure our programme was authoritative we should visit the Tantric centre at Tarapeeth in West Bengal. There we found a small community of Tantrics who spent their lives meditating in a cremation ground set in a grove on the bank of a river.
Smoke was still rising from a funeral pyre when we arrived. We spoke to two Tantric sadhus who lived in small mud huts nearby. Tantrics have a reputation for miraculous powers, and one of the sadhus was very interested in performing ‘magic’, as he called it. The trick I remember best from that day involved a smoking skull. The Tantric balanced a lit cigarette in the mouth of a human skull and instructed us to watch closely, which was rather difficult to do with the dense smoke from the hut’s fire-pit in our eyes. The end of the cigarette glowed and dimmed as if the skull were inhaling.
The second Tantric was a far more serious and impressive man. He sat on a throne of skulls in front of the fire-pit on the floor of his hut, where he performed his rituals. I asked him why he had chosen to spend his life meditating in a place where he was permanently reminded of death. ‘That is the point,’ he replied. ‘In Tantra you learn to overcome fear of anything. So we meditate here to overcome our fear of death, and I sit on a throne of skulls, which many would consider to be a sacrilege.’ The Tantric went on to explain that for him death had become a passage, and he had no fear of the transience of existence. ‘I live in three times: past, present, and future,’ he said.
Tantrics believe they must overcome the fear that lies behind many taboos, including the fear of impurity and pollution. Therefore they can offer hair, blood, fish and meat in their sacrifical rites, as well as other things usually regarded as impure, which means that many of their practices would seem scandalous to other Hindus.
I approached the subject of sex rather gingerly for fear that he would think that I, as a Westerner, had only come to see him because I had heard fascinating reports about Tantric sex. The Tantric laughed at my hesitation and said, ‘I knew you would ask about that – and why not? After all, we have to overcome our fear of sex too and I believe that underneath all the Western freedom we hear about – even in this remote place – lies a fear of sex, or at the least an inability to come to terms with it. For us, sex is not to be feared because it is a way to expand consciousness. But then there are special rites for this, and sex has to be refined; rules and discipline have to be followed.’
The Tantric explained how sex was one way of arousing what he called the ‘cosmic energy’ in all of us and of becoming sources ourselves of that energy. ‘You achieve a sense of bliss,’ he said. ‘How to put it? In our tradition it is described as the purest form of consciousness, like a flash of lightning, tender as lotus fibre, the fine golden thread that binds all believers, the sap of creation.’
In spite of traditions that combine the sacred and the sensual, there is a repressive sexuality that is widespread in India too. Sudhir Kakar has studied this in his book Intimate Relations, which he describes as ‘a site report, an account of intimate relations as perceived and defined by the participants’. And those accounts make dismal reading. Describing interviews with low caste women who had migrated from villages to a poor locality in Delhi, Sudhir Kakar says they revealed:
… sexuality pervaded by hostility and indifference rather than affection and tenderness. Most women portrayed even sexual intercourse as a furtive act in a cramped and crowded room lasting barely a few minutes and with a marked absence of physical and emotional caressing. Most women found it painful or distasteful or both. It was an experience to be submitted to, often from a fear of beating. None of the women removed their clothes for the act since it is considered shameful to do so.
The sexual taboos remained so strong in some areas that the women in these communities didn’t have a word for their genitals. As for the more opulent Indian women, Sudhir Kakar has had personal experience of the ‘sexual woes of a vast number of middle and upper class women who come for psychotherapy’.
There are parallels with Victorian hypocrisy in India’s public life as well, such as the long-running saga of the kiss in Indian films. ‘No kissing, please, we’re Indians’ was the view the censors took when I first came to India, and remained so for a long time. Directors got around this problem by including scenes where female leads somehow found themselves in wet saris which, if not quite see-through, were certainly suggestive enough to titillate the audience. These days, the situation has moved on and the ban on kissing has been relaxed. But that still leaves the question of whether a kiss is always acceptable. A lesbian kiss in Deepa Mehta’s film Fire provoked demonstrations in Mumbai in 1998 and the trashing of the cinemas that showed the film. Members of a Hindu party protested in their underwear outside the home of an actor who had filed a petition against their earlier demonstrations. Hypocrisy was rife in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in 2005 when a female film star called Khushboo said that men should no longer expect their brides to be virgins. In what the Hindustan Times called ‘a mad display of priggishness and prudery’, no less than twenty-five defamation cases were filed against her, and she eventually issued a public apology for her remarks. Even more incredib
ly, a minister in the last coalition government headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party objected to the mention of condoms in a campaign designed to make Indians aware of the dangers of Aids.
India’s long hangover from the Raj, with its Victorian morality, has helped to stifle the tradition that was able to see the sacred in the sensual. However, the influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the parallel tradition of sexual abstinence that he followed must also bear some of the responsibility for this. The Mahatma and others like him didn’t advocate the benefits of abstinence purely for religious reasons, for sacrificing sexual love for a higher love, or for self-discipline. They also argued that abstinence was good for a person and empowered him or her.
When I interviewed India’s austere Gandhian Prime Minister Morarji Desai in 1978, he was as open about his sex life as he was about his habit of drinking his own urine. He told me he hadn’t slept with his wife since he was in his early thirties, and went on to explain that semen was a liberating force that should be stored, not depleted. There is a common belief in India that if semen is stored its energy can, through yogic practices, be raised up to the head, where it empowers men to achieve union with the divine. Indian mythology has plenty of ascetics who are praised for their asceticism and the powers that come with it. But there are also, I am glad to say, many ascetics in mythology who fall for temptresses, and the gods are happy to see them so humbled.
The values of asceticism are praised in the popular versions of the influential epic, the Ramayana. The name of its hero, Rama, was on the lips of the Mahatma when he died. Rama and his wife Sita are worshipped as incarnations of absolute Truth, absolute God. Rama is also known as Purushottam – the best of men – and for centuries has been regarded as a model for mankind. To many devotees, Sita and Rama’s love for each other, pervaded as it is by ideas of devotion, duty and restraint, represents an ideal relationship. Rama is the perfect son and the perfect prince. He obediently accepts exile from his kingdom, and it is during this period that he and his wife live in the forests as ascetics.
