by Mark Tully
Once, when she was speaking in India, I heard Kathleen Raine raise a point that seems to me particularly relevant to the Ireland of today. She attributed the West’s spiritual impoverishment to ‘a mind set which seems consistently incapable of imagining any ground of reality other than so called matter’. Then she compared this with ‘the great edifice of India’s spiritual civilisation’, and went on to ask the West ‘whether we had now advanced to a point where we are ready to learn’. Perhaps the beginning of the current backlash means that Ireland will be willing to learn.
KHAJURAHO: THE SENSUAL AND THE SACRED
WHEN I ARRIVED in Delhi in 1966, one of the first flights I took out of the city was to Khajuraho in central India. This small town, little more than an overgrown village, is famous for its temples with their erotic carvings. I travelled to Khajuraho with my boss of the time, Mark Dodd. We flew in a Dakota plane, which took so long to take off that I turned and said to Mark, ‘At this rate we’ll have driven there before we’re airborne!’ But eventually the elderly aeroplane staggered into the air, and some two hours later it deposited us at what passed for Khajuraho airport.
Mark and I found that the western group of temples, which were once hidden in thick jungle, were now surrounded by a park with neatly trimmed lawns, paths and flowerbeds. It seemed to me a tame, man-made setting for monuments that celebrate nature with such intricate carvings of deer, elephants, tigers and lions, dancing peacocks, cuckoos and other birds, and, of course, images of our own natural impulses. But the golden sandstone temples with their tall towers curving gently towards their crown – an urn symbolising the urn that carries the nectar of immortality according to Hindu legend – could not be diminished by their surroundings. The builders had piled blocks of golden sandstone one upon the other in such perfect balance that no mortar or cement was required to hold them in place. The sandstone was soft enough to allow the sculptors to show even the smallest details of each figure, such as single strands of hair.
The portion of the temple walls between the approach to the sanctuary and the sanctuary itself is covered with carvings that show almost every position in which it is possible to have sex. While Mark and I were walking round one of the temples, we heard two young Sikhs discussing a carving of a yogic position in which a man stands on his head and a woman sits on him between his thighs, making love.
One of the Sikhs commented, ‘No, that’s just not possible.’
Without a moment’s hesitation the other retorted, ‘Yes, it is – I’ve done it!’
The Victorian era in Britain was marked by a prudery that hid an obsession with sex and plenty of hypocrisy. It is therefore not surprising that when T.S. Burt, a British military engineer, stumbled upon the temples of Khajuraho in the middle of thick jungle in 1838, he was shocked by the erotic carvings on their walls. The seven Hindu temples he discovered were, he said, ‘Most beautifully and exquisitely carved as to workmanship, but the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow rather warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing; indeed, some of the sculptures here were extremely indecent and offensive, which I was at first much surprised to find in temples that are professed to be erected for good purposes, and on account of religion.’ He went on to criticise the religion of the Hindus who had built the temples at least 800 years earlier. In his view, their religion ‘could not have been very chaste if it induced people, under the cloak of religion, to design the most disgraceful representation to desecrate their ecclesiastical erections’. He was surprised that the Hindus of his time, such as the porters accompanying him, were delighted by the erotic carvings and ‘took good care to point them out to all present’. Fourteen years later a more senior officer, Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham, documented the temples. He considered the erotic carvings ‘highly indecent’, and ‘disgustingly obscene’.
My initial reaction to the carvings was not dissimilar to Burt’s. ‘How,’ I wondered, ‘could religion and this blatant sexuality go together?’ What could be the religious purpose of this erotica? At that stage in my life, I still held rigid beliefs about sex that I believed were true according to Christian teaching. Everything I had been taught had implied that the sexual impulse was something to be repressed. It certainly wasn’t something to be rejoiced in, as the sculptors of the beautiful temples of Khajuraho obviously did.
The Roman Catholic Church maintains that its teaching on celibacy and chastity does not devalue the sexual side of our nature, but what is taught even by Churches that do not insist on clerical celibacy seems to imply that there is something inherently evil in sex. As a schoolboy preparing to be confirmed in the Anglican Church I had to study the catechism, in which I was told I should ‘renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanity of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh’. To a testosterone-charged teenage boy, the lusts of the flesh could only mean one thing: sex. And these lusts became the work of the Devil I failed to renounce.
The Christian fear of sex – and the guilt and repression that are its inevitable counterparts – dates all the way back to the earliest days of the Church, when St Paul advised the Christians in Corinth that it would be better for them to live a celibate life as he did, but if they could not cope with that, then they should marry because it was ‘better to marry than to burn’.
St Augustine was perhaps the greatest of the early Church fathers, and another man who had a profound impact on theology, including Christianity’s attitude to love and sex. He famously asked God to ‘give me chastity and continency, but not yet’, which might be taken to imply he thought sex was a bit of a joke. However, that wasn’t the case at all. Once he had become chaste, St Augustine condemned all sexual activity. He believed that Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden consisted of their having sex together, which meant that sex was the true cause of the Fall of man. According to Augustine, any man or woman who wanted to be ‘righteous in God’s sight’ should live a celibate life.
St Jerome, the early Church father who translated the Bible from its original languages into Latin, assessed the value of different ways of living and gave virginity one hundred marks out of one hundred, whereas marriage only got thirty. However, Martin Luther, who founded the anti-Catholic Reformation in Germany, was a bitter critic of celibacy. He married a nun who had managed to escape from a convent into which she had been forced against her will. But even Luther thought sex was such a powerful force for evil that only marriage could protect a person from immorality – and therefore anyone who wasn’t married must be a sinner.
It seems to me that this condemnation of sex is theologically flawed because it implies that one of God’s gifts to us is evil. It forgets that self-denial can be just as destructive as self-indulgence. It ignores or, at best, underestimates the difficulty of suppressing sexuality. In his book, A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a conversation with a friend who had been a Trappist monk, and so a member of one of the most austere orders of the Roman Catholic Church. The monk told Fermor that he had experienced ‘gruelling struggles with the flesh’. Usually he was too busy with his religious duties and the hard physical toil required of a monk to be troubled by the temptations of the flesh, but then, ‘all of a sudden, the surge of restless thoughts would begin. As often as not, profane and carnal visions would be reinforced by the murmurings of religious doubt, and at the end of these alarming onslaughts, from which he emerged unscathed only with the help of prayer and a kind of mental fight, he would feel utterly exhausted.’ After winning the first of those battles, the monk asked his confessor whether it was an outright victory, whether temptation was vanquished for ever. The confessor, a wise old monk, shook his head ruefully and assured him that ‘no monk, however holy, could say that he was immune for life; the Devil, incensed by defeat, lulled his foe by inaction, and then returned to the attack with sevenfold reinforcements’.
If we go back no further than the Victorian moral code that was still being taught when I was
at school in the fifties, we will find that sex was regarded as the number one sin.
Although nobody to this day knows for sure why those erotic sculptures decorate the splendid temples of Khajuraho, after many years in India I think I have come to a better understanding of the possible theology behind them. It’s an understanding that has led me to believe that our response to our sexuality should be neither those of the repressive Christian tradition nor the modern licence, in which it seems that everything is acceptable, but a middle way between the two.
When I asked the Indian Jungian therapist Rashna Imhasly-Gandhy whether I was right in believing that Western sexual mores have swung from one extreme to another, from repression to a liberation that has become a licence without boundaries, she said, ‘Too true. You have gone from constipation to diarrhoea!’ Rashna added, ‘For many of my patients materialism has replaced any form of spirituality, so they have no path which can guide them, no collected coherent system of belief to fall back on.’
The Victorian morality I was taught didn’t gradually fade into the night: it departed with a bang in the sixties. Now, as my schoolmaster friend Richard Wilkinson has said, the boys and girls at Marlborough would regard the suggestion that they should not have sex before marriage as ludicrous. As for dressing modestly, which was such an obsession with the Victorians that some of them even clothed the legs of tables lest they provoked lecherous thoughts, the aim today seems to be to dress as provocatively as possible. Nudity in films and television dramas is no longer surprising, and it seems almost obligatory to have sex scenes in novels.
The new morality claims that it has liberated women, but it has also exploited them as sex objects. Advertising is the most obvious example of this exploitation, for what is using women’s bodies to sell goods ranging from cars to bars of soap other than making them into sex objects? The message of many advertisements to men seems to be that driving a particular car or using a particular soap will make women fall for them, with the not always disguised additional suggestion that women will then want to have sex. In India there is a stricter code on advertising than in the West and more rigorous film censorship, but nevertheless the television coverage of a recent international cricket series was interrupted after almost every over by an advertisement for a male hair gel called ‘Set Wet’, described by a husky female voice as, ‘Sexy – very, very sexy’.
In his book Growth Fetish, the Australian economist Clive Hamilton writes: ‘In the 1950s middle-class respectability may have been oppressive but it carried with it a certain deference. Women are the subject of far more sexual objectification now than they were in the 1950s, although men have become more adept at concealing it.’ Katherine Rake is Director of the Fawcett Society, which was founded in 1866 in order to campaign for women’s right to vote in Britain and is named in honour of Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, one of the foremost suffragettes in that sixty-year-long struggle. The society now campaigns for equality between men and women. Katherine Rake says that one of the problems now facing the feminist movement is ‘the hypersexualisation of our culture, a phenomenon that has developed and snowballed with hardly a murmur of dissent’.
‘Hardly a murmur of dissent’ is the point. Any suggestion by Church leaders or anyone else that the sexual revolution might be going too fast and too far is derided as old-fashioned, illiberal, and – of course – as wanting to re-impose the old restrictive morality. Once again there is a false alternative here: it is suggested that either you believe in the sexual revolution of the sixties or you want to go back to Victorian times. But Katherine Rake, who certainly has no desire to go back to the repression of the fifties, points out that many women are suffering from the new morality in spite of its claims to have made life better for all by making it freer. She says: ‘Against a background of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects, rates of self-harm among women are spiralling, eating disorders are on the rise, and plastic surgery is booming.’ Nor, according to Rake, has the new morality done much to alter the power relations between men and women. According to her, men are still the top dogs.
It is perhaps not surprising that many feminists are calling for ‘a new wave of feminism’, a wave that will change the power relations between the sexes profoundly. But it would be a mistake to ignore the changes for the good that the years since the sixties have achieved. When I was young, most parents saw nothing unusual in sending their sons to university and their daughters to secretarial college without giving them any choice in the matter. Nowadays, most people would regard that as unacceptable. Although more men than women still get to the top of the tree, the women who do make it are no longer rare exceptions in most professions. My own profession, journalism, was once very much a man’s world, but now when I listen to the BBC’s World Service Radio it seems to have become a woman’s domain.
Although not all women get paid the same rate as men for doing the same job, more and more are receiving equal pay. In the West, women are also better protected legally than they once were. Taking British law as an example, rape in marriage is now illegal. Sexual harassment and discrimination at work can be challenged. Maternity leave is a right. As regards the situation in Ireland, I have to agree with the Irish lawyer who said to me, ‘For all the new problems we now face, I honestly believe Ireland is a happier place now than it was when strict Catholic morality dominated society.’ I would certainly not like to go back to the morality of my young days.
Westerners have always tended to be ruled by one form or other of moral orthodoxy, and so it is perhaps not surprising that the sexual revolution has imposed an orthodoxy that is just as pervasive as the Victorian morality once was. However, in India, with its long tradition of heterodoxy, different understandings of sexuality have long lived side by side. There has certainly been a repressive tradition, but India is also the country in which the Kama Sutra was written.
Ancient Indians were concerned with the scientific study of human behaviour. They were particularly interested in how life should be lived to achieve four main aims. The first three goals of human life were held to be those of dharma (virtue and the following of religious practices), artha (economic prosperity) and kama (desire, pleasure and love, including the erotic). These led to the final goal of moksha, liberation from suffering and from the cycle of death and rebirth.
The title of the Kama Sutra shows its concern with the third goal in life. The author, the sage Vatsyayana, drew his material from earlier scientific studies of kama. He described sex as it was practised, without flinching from descriptions of homosexuality and adultery, which – although officially frowned upon – were included in his work because he knew that these transgressions from the norm were realities.
The Kama Sutra is not a simple sex guide designed to improve performance. Nor does it ignore morality. There are even verses at the end of chapters to tell readers how to behave. For instance, at the end of the chapter on seducing other men’s wives, Vatsyayana states that he has described these techniques not so as to encourage or enable adulterers to succeed in their deceptions but to warn husbands in order that they will not be deceived by their wives. The last verse explains:
This book was undertaken in order
To guard wives for the benefit of men;
Its arrangements should not be learned
In order to corrupt the people.
This might suggest that the Kama Sutra is restricted to a purely male perspective on sexuality. It is not. Vatsyayana clearly recognises that women have sexual desires too, and advises them on how these might be fulfilled. His guidance ranges from telling virgins how to get husbands to a discussion of the female orgasm, which, as the psychoanalysts Sudhir Kakar and Wendy Doniger rightly point out in their introduction to their translation of the Kama Sutra, is ‘far more subtle than views that prevailed in Europe until very recently indeed’. The women described in the Kama Sutra are not passive – they are very active. Vatsyayana describes four types of foreplay, in two of which the
woman is the active partner. The position portrayed in the carvings at Khajuraho that I mentioned earlier is called ‘Climbing the Tree’, about which Vatsyayana writes: ‘She steps on his foot with her foot, places her other foot on his thigh or wraps her leg around him, with one arm gripping his back and the other bending down his shoulder, and panting gently, moaning a little, she tries to climb him to kiss him.’
In their edition of the Kama Sutra, Kaka and Doniger suggest that the work does much more than portray active female sexuality. Rather, Vatsyayana’s classic text ‘takes a momentous step in the history of Indian sexuality by introducing the notion of love in sex’. There is even advice in one chapter on how to make a virgin bride trust her husband and fall in love with him. Kakar and Doniger see the Kama Sutra as ‘a tender balancing act’ between ‘the erotic love and the possessiveness of sexual desire, between the disorder of instinctuality and the moral forces of order, between the imperatives of nature and the civilizing attempts of culture’. They believe that the work is relevant today because the imperatives of nature predominate: ‘In today’s post-moral world,’ they claim, ‘the danger to erotic pleasure is less from the icy front of morality than from the fierce heat of instinctual desire. The Kamasutra’s most valuable insight, then, is that pleasure needs to be cultivated, that in the realm of sex, nature requires culture.’
The Kama Sutra has not always been so well served by its translators. Morality in the nineteenth century put up such a cold front that most translators shied away from revealing the explicit nature of the work. To get round the political correctness and prudery of his day, one German translator went so far as to render the more explicit sections of the text in Latin. By contrast, in the late twentieth century ‘the fierce heat of instinctual desire’ has all too often turned the Kama Sutra into a sexual extravaganza, a book to be leered over and tittered at.
