by Sally Howard
It was during the high summer of the British Raj, when Britain itself was subject to an unprecedented wave of sexual repression, that the fame of the erotic temples at Khajuraho took flight. For several centuries, these complexes sat forgotten, reabsorbed by the thick central Indian forestland, untouched by the marauding Muslim Caliphates. Then, in 1863, they were discovered for our modern age by Alexander Cunningham, a general who was undertaking a survey of Madhya Pradesh as part of the British Raj’s Archaeological Survey of India.
Cunningham, who conducted his surveys from the comfort of a palanquin carried by coolies, described the temple friezes he discovered at Khajuraho, in his report back to headquarters at Calcutta, as ‘rather warm’. Later responses to the temples at Khajuraho were less understated. By the 1870s, the site had been determined a threat to ‘public morality’, with both Indian subjects and British dissuaded from visiting the complexes for fear that their blatant carnality would corrupt the women – the British memsahibs – charged with maintaining civilised sexual standards in the colonies.
‘The Britishers called them the “Kama Sutra Temples”,’ continues Ahay, ‘whereas in fact, the Kama Sutra isn’t all sex, sex, sex.’ He removes a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs his perspiring brow. ‘It’s just one of a collection of erotic and advice texts – the Kamashastra – on good and gracious living. The specific advice as to the seeking of kama, or pleasure, was aimed at the leisured playboy, or man about town, of the booming Gupta Empire. The text was composed at some point between the first and fifth centuries and is ascribed to a sage named Vatsyayana. We don’t know much about him, except perhaps that he was celibate!’
‘And who was the Victorian Britisher translator?’ asks Dimple. ‘He was taking a risk, wasn’t he?’
‘Sir Richard Burton,’ continues Ajay, ‘British Raj officer, scholar and adventurer. And it was a very risky business indeed. He and his fellow translator, a gentleman by the name of Arbuthnot, were almost imprisoned for their translation, so obscene was the text considered. Incredibly, Burton’s translation, while widely circulated from the late nineteenth century, wasn’t formally published in Britain and America until 1962!’
It was these postcards from India’s sexually liberal past – the erotic art and literature caught under the umbrella category of the Kama Sutra – that would do so much to sharpen the Victorian stereotyping of the Indian subcontinent as morally lax. Soon it would lead to a crackdown on practices and ancient communities seen as representative of such looseness, such as the ancient tradition of tawaifs, or courtly concubines; the devadasi caste married to temple deities (and sometimes, though not always, engaged in prostitution); and the hijras, or eunuch caste.
In all-India censuses in 1868 and again in 1871, select groups that the Raj reformers wanted to monitor were focused on, including prostitutes, lepers and eunuchs (women, incidentally, were listed only by number per household, not by name). These castes began their slow and inevitable decline from respectability, although their communities endured. It was a downhill path for these increasingly embattled groups that could only lead in one direction: sex work.
In the frieze in front of us, the goddess Kali is less in a sexual position than part of a sexual tableau. Her breasts have been eroded, not by the invading forces of Islam, but by ten centuries of wear and tear. Yet elsewhere on her body, her lineaments are so well preserved she could have been carved last week.
On her head is a pointed hairdo that echoes the honeycomb temple spires of the temples that ring every blue horizon. At her shoulders are two naked apsara, heavenly nymphs, who sit cross-legged and play with their breasts, which are high and round like cantaloupe melons. At her feet, two griffins tug at their penises: the figure on the left simultaneously pleasuring a neighbour; the figure on the right, with his free hand, devouring a leaf.
‘You’ll know betel leaf,’ says Ajay, extracting from his pocket a paan preparation, the Indian digestif in which betel leaf is wrapped around sweets and aromatics, such as coconut and rose-petal preserve. ‘In India today we eat it like this, or real betel addicts will chew at the leaves on their own. But it’s also always been an aphrodisiac. In the Kama Sutra a couple is advised to prepare for sex by rubbing each other’s bodies in sandalwood ointment and feeding betel to one another; like, I suppose, how you in the West use body oil and champagne.’
We continue around the back of Kandariyâ Mahâdeva, to a parade of even more lusciously pornographic maithunas, on Lakshmana temple. At the first, a woman’s hand rests on a man’s genitalia as, to their right, two men turn towards each other, tongues groping. At the next, a standing man copulates with a cross-legged woman, who’s supported by two masturbating attendants. In another, a male fellates another male, who lies supine, as a griffin pulls a mischievous face.
As we stand, taking in this convoluted sexual scene, an Indian family of six walks past. It comprises two teenage sons, one in a high-necked Muslim-style shirt and the other a black Iron Maiden T-shirt, a daughter in thick spectacles, two conservative-looking parents and a grandmother who’s wearing two layered cardigans and flip-flops teamed with socks.
As is usual in this nation where few feel there’s an inherent rudeness in staring, the family stops and stares – not at the erotic friezes, but at the firangi looking at them. One of the sons pulls out a camera and demands of me ‘one photo’. As it’s taken he stands next to me stiffly, one hand perched on my shoulder, pointing at the uncompromising tableaux behind us with his outside arm.
Dimple tuts as the family retreats. The ‘one photo’ phenomenon – the regular interruption of our trips by Indian tourists beseeching us for a holiday snap with the tall white woman – never fails to irritate her. I wonder why. Is it that she sees such behaviour as rustic, a bad advertisement for her uncosmopolitan countrymen? I don’t have time to ask. As they move away, she says, in an exaggerated whisper, ‘This one reminds me of how I used to climb trees as a kid.’
She’s pointing at a frieze of a couple whose limbs are bound round one another, like a Boy Scout’s knot. The woman rests one of her feet on the foot of the man, the other against his thigh. One of her arms is braced behind his back for support as the other clings to his shoulder and neck; and, in a twist that’s trademark Khajuraho, the couple is bracketed by a pair of acolyte deities, their faces contorted as if in agony or ecstasy and their penises in their hands. I reach into my rucksack for a book, shaking from its well-thumbed pages grains of pale sand, a souvenir from my last trip to Goa.
‘It’s one of the four main sexual embraces of the Kama Sutra,’ I say. ‘Listen: “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 on his shoulder, and panting gently, moaning a little, she tries to climb him to kiss him …” It’s called “Climbing the Tree”.’
Dimple laughs in delight.
As we walk along the shaded far wall of Lakshmana, I remind myself of the Kama Sutra’s other big three positions. There’s the ‘Twining Vine’, which looks like what we’d call today a standing-up cowgirl. Then there’s the ‘Rice and Sesame’, in which the couple’s thighs and arms are entangled ‘so tightly they seem to be wrestling with each other’; and the ‘Milk and Water’, a more recognisable position to Western eyes, in which the woman is seated on the man’s lap, facing him.
At Khajuraho, as in the Kama Sutra, there’s much that seems familiar in the depiction of sex, but also much that feels very different. For a start, there’s a lot more on offer, in terms of sexual positions, than the stock moves of Western pornography, giving a sense that the pleasures of sex have narrowed rather than broadened in the hundreds of intervening years.
Ajay leads us to the jutting west corner of the temple and then, with a lightning grin, exclaims, ‘Look, here’s something showing what ancient Hindus can teach us about not taking sex and religion too seriously. It’s Ganesh, the elephant god, wearing a broad smile. And what’s
he looking at?’
A voyeuristic Ganesh (Kirat Sodhi).
It’s a trick of perspective. We round 90 degrees of the temple wall and see, behind Ganesh, a bald-headed Brahmin priest in flagrante with a court maiden, supplely doubled over, forehead to her knees. It becomes clear now that Ganesh is looking on: the self-congratulating voyeur. This playfulness would be unconscionable in the Judeo-Christian tradition or Islam, especially twenty-first-century Islam, undergoing the painful spasms of change.
So what was the original purpose of Khajuraho’s unapologetic erotic art? No one really knows. Some say the maithunas were a sex education tool, something like a medieval Joy of Sex. Many academics point out that the maithunas decorate the lower panels of the temples but are absent from those higher up, and that they thus might depict low human impulses that need to be overcome in order to reach a higher spirituality and enlightenment. A third argument runs that they were designed to distract the gods from exhibiting their wrath during bad monsoons; still another that they’re a pictorial storyboard representing the wedding night of the god Shiva and his second consort Parvati.
We sit on the high Jagati stone plinth of the Varaha temple. Behind us, framed by huge stone columns, is a temple deity in the shape of a giant stone boar: Varaha, or the third avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, the supreme god in Vaishnavism, one of the four major branches of Hinduism. In front of us, from our elevated height, is a fine view of the Western Complex dotted with tourists and – on the horizon behind the temple silhouettes – of a purple-pink setting sun.
Our vantage point buys us a respite from the hawkers who’ve been tailing us for the past 15 minutes. Khajuraho’s modern, ancillary tourist town does a brisk trade in sex for sale, from mildly inoffensive plastic memorabilia to the women and child prostitutes plying the transport hubs and, in a new trend, young male gigolos who solicit older female travellers in the town’s tourist cafés.
‘It’s unlikely Khajuraho actually has anything to do with the Kama Sutra,’ Ajay says now, crossing his flares for better purchase on the high plinth. ‘In case you’re wondering, the “kama” of the title doesn’t refer to the concept of cause and effect, as many Westerners think, but to one of the four central Hindu purusarthas, or aims in life: sexual or erotic pleasure. The others are dharma, which is like duty, justice or social obligation; artha, which is about money, political power or success; and moksha, the goal sought at the end of a Hindu’s life – spiritual liberation. Kama itself encompasses the sensual pleasures of food, perfume and music, so it’s a much bigger concept than what is often believed today. Sutra literally means “thread”, and refers to the punchy style of text, littered with aphorisms, which encourages rote learning or learning by heart.’
‘Hah!’ says Dimple again. ‘We’ve lost so much understanding. Did you know that Sanskrit has over 20 words for sex? And that Hindi has words about sex that have no direct translation into English? There’s chudasi, which means ‘sadness after sex’; and meetha dard or ‘sweet ache’, which is like the heavy feelings in one’s limbs after sex.
‘We’ve lost so much,’ she adds again dolefully, looking down at a group of teenagers in neat Christian school uniform, sniggering behind their hands at the friezes.
There’s one more thing I want to ask Ajay about before we battle our way out of the temple complexes: Tantra. It’s a word we’ve heard in passing several times today and is the aspect of Indian spiritual practice that’s perhaps most misunderstood in the West. To Westerners, Tantra is best known for its sexual rites: the techniques of delaying orgasm made famous by Sting and Trudi Styler, for example.
When I mention this, Ajay sighs in exasperation. ‘Tantrism is very misunderstood today, even in India,’ he says. ‘It was actually a method of religious practice whose rites dominated Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism for over 700 years. You see, unlike previous traditions, which tended to describe the world as an illusion, Tantra celebrated and incorporated the earthly in its rites. So the here and now was to be embraced, rather than renounced. A very small number of these rites were based on the Shakti school of Tantra – Shakti, you see, again? This school believed that male energy could only become complete by being united with the female, spiritually and sexually.
‘So, this is where the sexual rites come from,’ he explained. ‘As with many concepts in Indian religion, the good and bad come in the practice. So Shakti Tantrism gives us a celebration of human sexuality, but it also, as a downside, gave us the practice of forcing young women, devadasis devoted to god, to work as prostitutes at Tantric temples.’
Much as modern Indians protest – and they certainly do – about the Western sensationalism of Tantrism, there is ample corroborating material for a titillating approach. Consider the nitty-gritty, for example, of practices such as vajroli-mudra, in which the male initiate trains himself to draw the amrita, or intermingled male and female sexual fluids, back into his penis, like a phallic straw. Or the portfolio of practices aimed at arousing the Kundalini, the primal power of the central nervous system.
The anally focused techniques devised by Tantra to wake the ‘coiled beast’ of Kundalini include Tada Mudra (knocking one’s buttocks on the ground); rolling a cotton ball under one’s tailbone; and the key Tantric activation method of Adhorata, or anal sex. The principal aim in Adhorata is the ejaculation of semen into the rectum, which is said to nourish the Kundalini gland – believed to be housed between the rectal wall and the coccyx – ‘like the white of an egg fertilises the yolk’ and to sustain and arouse the resident Shakti. As late as the 1920s, exquisite ‘anal technicians’ proliferated in Indian prostitute castes, among the ei chou troupes of boy actors (who hailed from China) and the touring dancing boys of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka, known throughout the nineteenth century for its male prostitution).
Dimple and I take Raja’s leave at the Western Complex gates, bundling into the back seat of an autorickshaw that’s chugging away expectantly, surrounded by touts. Inside its leaf-green and yellow trimmed exterior the vehicle boasts the usual accoutrements: a driver with a jumpy accelerator foot, a tinted-glass windscreen and thick rexine seat covers printed with cartoon images of strawberries. We pull away from the broken kerb and soon the sights and sounds of the city horns and hawkers fade to a whisper behind us, like crashing waves as you retreat from the shore.
As I stare out of the open doorway of the rickshaw at the dusty road blurring past, I think about how Khajuraho’s frank carnality must have struck the Victorian British. Cunningham, after all, alighted at the temples at the height of the Purity Movement’s grip on Britain. This was a late nineteeth-century social movement that sought to abolish prostitution and other sexual activities that were considered immoral. Composed primarily of women, the movement was active in English-speaking nations from the late 1860s to about 1910 and exerted an important influence on the contemporaneous birth control, eugenics and feminist ideologies. So the Hindu ancients may have proposed a lively coitus, but Britons at home were experiencing an unprecedented repression of sexual freedoms: a de facto ban on sexual education; a denunciation of masturbation as mentally scarring; and an assertion of all those aspects of prudery we find so easy to mock today – covered-up women’s ankles and piano legs, for example.
By the time of Cunningham’s expeditions, Britain had long forgotten the sexual exuberance that had held sway through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those years when men were celebrated for Byronic sexual potency; when London led the world trade in exports of pornographic pictorials; and when London brothels catered to every coital tastebud, from lovers of Japanese women to pederasts. As late as 1830, a nursing home in London looked after busy boy prostitutes afflicted with venereal disease. However, by the 1850s a vigorous moral campaign was being waged on British soil against prostitution, extra-conjugal sex, masturbation and sexual activity between males. In later decades, as we will explore, it would come to have far-reaching consequences for the subjects of that nation’s coloni
al territories.
A century later, as Chapter 10 will show, the lustfulness of ancient Hinduism struck a chord with a generation of Westerners who were casting off the last vestiges of these late Victorian hang-ups. Inspired by the Western sexual revolution’s prerogatives of chemical and sexual experimentation, these ‘Goa Freaks’ came to Khajuraho as part of a circuit that took in Kundalini-raising retreats in the Himalayas, the ghats at Varanasi and weeks-long LSD-fuelled sex orgies in pursuit of transcendence on Goan and Keralan beaches. The hippy set’s attentions did much to create the haphazard tourist town that’s now grown up at Khajuraho, little more than a backwater until the 1960s.
Today Khajuraho is firmly on the tourist map, for foreigners and inquisitive Indians alike. Even so, and as we’ll also see in the pages to come, this shouldn’t be taken as evidence that India has reached a greater ease with issues of sex and sexuality. As its economy forges ahead, social change – particularly around sex – is lagging behind. These attitudes are at the root of the headline-grabbing 2012 and 2013 Delhi gang rapes, and the uprisings that followed; and they’re behind the daily miseries of life for many Indian women, who are routinely subject to being kidnapped for marriage and forced to wed against their will; being set light to when their dowries are considered insufficient by their groom; and raped within marriage with legal impunity (section 375 of the Indian Penal Code considers forced sex in marriage as a crime only when the wife is below the age of 15).
Further evidence of the incendiary response to sex and sexuality in today’s India exists in the controversies around the modern counterparts to the sculptors at Khajuraho. M.F. Husain, India’s most famous contemporary artist (and a Muslim), made his career on the scandal provoked by a series of paintings depicting copulating Hindu gods in flagrante (most famously Durga in sexual union with a tiger) while, more recently, an installation at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University in Gujarat provoked uproar from religious groups for portraying sacred figures in naked poses, and led to the young artist’s arrest and imprisonment.
