The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  And so, in much the way that the San Francisco 1967 Summer of Love mutated into a city benighted by drug addiction and crime by the waning days of that decade, the Goa Freak idyll was distorted into a bacchanalia of summer drug binges and monsoon-month drug runs to support the Freaks’ extravagant habits. By 1979, Odzer was running a drug den on the beach at the Freaks’ Goa stronghold of Anjuna, as she told Robbin:

  I called it ‘Anjuna Dragoona Saloona’. And I would sell hash and cocaine and heroin. And it started out as something really beautiful. But some people started to fix … to inject drugs. People got so hungry for the drug, and we didn’t have enough money. They had to inject it… So I split the house in two, and I had the people who were injecting on the second floor, and the people who were smoking and snorting on the ground floor. And somebody called it a ‘shooting gallery’. And I never heard that expression before, and I said ‘Oh, how cute; a shooting gallery!’ So in this way [many users] died. And a lot of people made mistakes because, with the heroin, you get lazy. ‘Uh, I should check on this, but no, I’m too lazy to check on this’. So they go to jail, they ended up in jail. Ultimately, our society died.

  The third outpost on this 1960s and 1970s hippy circuit was India’s holiest city, Varanasi, otherwise known as Benares. For several months in the 1970s, former Beatle George Harrison occupied a hotel overlooking one of the ghats, or ancient stairways leading down to the Ganges. Here he studied Hindu scripture, practised the sitar (having studied under Ravi Shankar in Bombay) and gathered material for what would become his 1974 album, Festival of India.

  ‘The Ganges, the Ganga, this is where they all come,’ says our guide Aram, an anthropology lecturer, as Dimple and I step out of an autorickshaw and into Kashi, the shadowy and aromatic old centre of this, the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth.

  ‘Goldie Hawn comes here every year and takes up a room overlooking the Holy River. George Harrison had his ashes scattered here. This is the Mother River, the embodiment of Shakti, the water that takes up the Hindu dead and, in doing so, it’s said, let’s loose their souls in the state of moksha.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ he continues, talking through teeth reddened by a betel leaf–chewing habit, ‘there are 8.4 million possibilities for your next reincarnation – from all the life in the sea to cockroaches and politicians. So, for some, earth is hell in this life, and for some, earth is heaven. Moksha is the escape from this cycle of birth and rebirth. It is the release of the soul.’

  If, as a Hindu, you make it to Kashi – on your own legs, on a stretcher when you’re gasping your last, or as a pot of ashes carried by your family members – moksha is pretty much in the bank. If you die at Varanasi, Hindus believe, release from the cycle of reincarnation is a double-seal guarantee. This belief accounts for the proliferation of hospices in Varanasi; and the regular sight of ailing people trailing catheters and oxygen supplies as they shuffle aboard buses, planes and trains bound for this northeast Indian city.

  In addition to tourists, moribund Hindus and Westerners on spiritual quests, Varanasi attracts holy men in their multitudes: from nomad ascetics who wander the hills, to showy gurus hoping to make a rupee by attracting Western devotees, in the tradition of Osho and Maharishi.

  Most notorious among these holy men at Varanasi are the Aghors, or Aghori, an enigmatic group that I’m here to meet. They are itinerant Tantric Hindu sadhus who make a point of embracing the grotesque and forbidden as a route to the divine. The Aghors live on the many smouldering cremation grounds in this city of death. They eat from human skulls; sometimes, it is said, even human flesh. To the modern Indian middle classes, the Aghors’ reputation is vampiric, something between Count Dracula and a campy Halloween drag act; part theatre, but part feared.

  A Delhi academic explained the Aghori philosophy to me by phone, as Dimple and I boarded a plane for the city, alongside a cabin full of elderly and ailing Hindus, at Lucknow airport. I was interested, in particular, in finding out about the Aghors’ unusual attitude to sex.

  ‘Ah, Aghors,’ he said, with a dark laugh, ‘they are very interesting, the Aghors. They think boundaries to mortal existence should be explored as a road to the divine: sex and death form these boundaries. So when it comes to sex and death, the Aghors have no taboos. And this in a religion, Hinduism, that’s based, of course, on its taboos.’

  The Aghors’ ideas of an intersection between sex and death reminded me of that famous French metaphor for orgasm, le petit mort or little death. It also called to mind that idea of a commingling of sex and the occult that so appealed to the hippies on their sex and spirituality quests; the idea, too, of sex used as a medium to the divine.

  ‘The Aghors have their reputation, and certainly they like to shock,’ Aram says, as we board a wooden boat, or bajra, at a ghatside awriggle with South Korean and American tourists. Dimple treads gingerly between cowpats onto the bajra’s wooden slats. She’s a little squeamish about Varanasi after, during her last trip here, being poked in the shoulder and turning around to discover that her assailant was the arm of a dead man, hanging off a stretcher bound for one of the hundreds of funeral pyres.

  ‘They will drink urine in front of you. They will lick a leper. They wear black, which is a big no-no to Hindus and why you see so many bright colors in sarees,’ Aram continues. ‘But you have to understand that this is not just to shock. It is Shiva. To Aghors, Shiva is the route to moksha and everything is Shiva; specifically everything in this, the city of Shiva. That includes, most precisely, the things that to Hindus are taboos.’

  We pull away from the ghat as a boat laden with camera-toting South Koreans lists into us, churning up a cumulus of the white plastic bags that bob on the bouillon-brown waters near the shore.

  ‘These taboos are the five Ms,’ Aram continues, as the boat steadies. ‘Fish eating, or matsya, is forbidden, and animal flesh eating, or māmsa. Wine, or madya, of course; and the eating of parched grains, which is an old idea about the purity of food. And the big one: sex, or maithu.’

  The Aghors’ attitude to sex strikes me as at odds with the asceticism espoused by most Indian holy men. Hindu sadhus are typically defined by their physical self-denial, most colourfully seen in the case of their extreme feats of physical privation, such as Amar Bharati, the sadhu who’s famously kept his right arm raised above his head since 1973.

  In Ashrama, the delineation of the four ideal stages of Hindu life, sexual abstinence features prominently: at Bramacharya, the stage of student life to age 27, when strict chastity is viewed as the ideal; and at Sannyasa, the fourth or renunciation stage, when the Hindu withdraws from the world and renounces earthly pursuits.

  Hindu scriptures prescribe the practice of Bramacharya (a word which came to mean chastity) for householders prior to important religious rites or observances. Of sadhus, or renunciates, a lifelong vow of Brahmacharya is often expected, to facilitate the devotee’s surrender to their gurus or gods. For the most extreme practitioners of Bramacharya the term became conflated with the principle of refraining from the voluntary loss of semen.

  In modern times the cult of sexual abstinence was famously espoused by Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi. In Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar examines Gandhi’s vow of celibacy through his lifelong correspondence. Before that vow, Gandhi admits he was a highly sexual and jealous husband to wife Kasturba Mohandas Gandhi, the daughter of a wealthy businessman to whom he was married by arrangement aged 14.

  Gandhi’s later renunciation of sex, Kakar suggests, can be traced back to his self-disgust around his father’s death; an event that occurred when Kasturba and Gandhi were engaged in sexual intercourse in the next room. In his letters, this revulsion grows. Studying in England in his 20s, Gandhi is conflicted by his attraction to prostitutes and English girls. It is during his long sojourn in South Africa that he thinks of becoming celibate, while reading Tolstoy, the Russian novelist who proposed celibacy within marriage as the highest h
uman state. Gandhi took the vow at 37 without consulting his wife.

  In later life he went on to experiment with brands of vegetarian diet that would lessen the sexual urge and instructed girls as young as 12, including his great-niece Manu, to sleep naked next to him, in order to test the efficacy of his formulas.

  ‘You know, you are honoured,’ says Aram, as we step gingerly onto a ghat step that’s sheening with wet fungal growth. ‘This is my very last boat trip for the year. Come the monsoon and the bodies start bobbing up and some guides still go out, but I can’t. You see, the city forbids the tipping of dead bodies in the river, but they still row out and dump in all those persons religion tells us we cannot burn: pregnant women and children, lepers, people killed by snakebite. And parts of bodies also: the limbs of the bodies whose families couldn’t afford the wood to burn the body properly.

  ‘I took a boat trip of tourists out late in the season two years ago,’ he continues ruefully. ‘And we saw one: a lady, her body all ghostly and bloated. She was pregnant. I relived it in my dreams for months. That’s why I don’t take boat tours in the monsoon.’

  We pick our way up the ghat, past a young Indian tourist wearing bright green slacks and a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Forget girlfriends: They get on your chest’.

  ‘The last time I brought a woman to meet this Aghor, Sri Nath, it was a mixed success,’ Aram now admits. ‘She was desperate to conceive. He told her to go screw herself and that her mother was a donkey. Then he told her to climb up a hill on her knees praising Shiva. But, you see she did conceive!’

  As for many Indian holy men, ad hoc fertility services are one of the Aghors’ main income streams, alongside casting out demons and curing illness.

  Sri Nath licks his sharp incisors as he takes us in. His limbs and great beehive of a dreadlock are caked in blue-white ash. At his feet is the ceremonial Aghor skull bowl, in his hand a staff with a skull-shaped handle and by his side, two young acolytes, who look to be in an advanced state of inebriation.

  He growls something unintelligible.

  ‘He’s asking us what we want,’ translates Aram.

  Sri Nath, too, looks tipsy. Like many of the Varanasi-based sadhus, the Aghors are prone to substance abuse: the traditional bhang and chillum and – increasingly – alcohol and white powders, the latter the result of the sadhus’ decades-long intermingling with the Western hippy and backpacker culture.

  ‘To ask him a few questions about his life,’ I assert, with a solicitous smile.

  Sri Nath belches as Aram translates the request back to him. Dimple and I flinch. With another crescendo belch, he shoots out his opened palm, onto which Aram counts 500 rupees in 100-bill denominations. Then, without waiting for a question, Sri Nath begins his jeremiad, prodding at the ground with his staff for emphasis. Aram translates.

  ‘He says he is the emperor of the cremation ground. He eats the offerings left for the dead. He takes the shrouds from the dead bodies. Nothing frightens him. Not people, not death. Ash is his clothing, as Lord Shiva himself uses it. Aghors, who are his children, are bound to use it.

  ‘He has this ceremonial skull, which he searched the banks of the Ganga for. Afterwards, he pounded out the flesh of the skull. Now he eats and drinks from that same skull. He has no disgust. If he has hate and disgust, how would he share his food with dogs and eat from cremation grounds?’

  Sri Nath lustily draws breath, before continuing.

  ‘At night he says people are scared of the funeral grounds. That’s when Sri Nath meditates undisturbed. He eats whatever is put in his bowl; maybe faeces; maybe human flesh. When the spirit is in him he would even drag a whole corpse off the pyre and eat it.’

  Sri Nath takes a generous hit of chillum, supplied by an attendant to his left, and falls silent. It’s a silence loaded with the implication that we should hand over another sheath of rupees.

  ‘What about sex?’ I ask, after a minute’s wait. ‘Does he follow the Aghori path of sex as a route to Shiva?’

  ‘He says that now he has no greed or no lust, like he has no clocking on to work,’ translates Aram. ‘When he was a younger Aghor he would have sex, with prostitutes. He would seek out sex considered dirty by other Hindus: sex for example with women who were menstruating… prostitutes who were menstruating. He would live among the prostitutes; to him they were the same as all women. To him there was no disgust, and no taboo. To him, all is Shiva.’

  ‘Did he ever have sex in the cremation grounds?’ I ask. ‘Or is this a myth about the Aghors?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Aram. ‘This is the ritual sex practice of the Aghors: to have sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman in a graveyard at nighttime. It is a Tantric act. The woman is smeared in ashes from the graveyard and other Aghors will read mantras and beat drums.

  ‘He says he is too old for the graveyard sex ritual now,’ continues Aram, as Dimple looks on wide-eyed.

  ‘He is complaining that it is difficult, even at night, to find peace and quiet at the cremation grounds to practise the Aghori rituals. Too many tourists, he says.’

  We found out more about graveyard sex when we spoke to Ashok, the leader of the Kena Ram Baba moderate Aghori sect, a mild-mannered man dressed in a powder-blue 1970s-style safari suit.

  Dimple, Aram and I meet Ashok at Varanasi’s Kena Ram Baba Aghori Temple, entering the complex through an arch decorated with a daisy chain of human skulls. Inside, the temple is ranged around an exhibit in a glass box, which we view as we wait for Ashok. The oddest is a model exhibit of great Aghori leader Kena Ram Baba (who died in 1992) on his magic flying carpet. As we wait for Ashok to arrive, Dimple asks a temple guide why the current leader doesn’t require the magic carpet for his own use.

  ‘Because it might hit the airplanes,’ the guide tells us, with no further explanation, before he pads off to retrieve Ashok.

  ‘You see, the Aghors believe that orgasm and sex in the company of the dead will give rise to superpowers,’ Ashok says.

  As we drive him to another centre run by the sect, a hospital across the Ganges on the outskirts of town, he expounds on the Aghori sex ritual.

  ‘It is believed that when this ritual involves sex with menstruating women the superpower sexual energy is released more effectively,’ he says. ‘One aspect of this ritual is that there has to be no force involved, and the woman has to take an equal part in the ritual, which is usually done in the dead of night. The ritual is elaborate and lasts for over an hour, from the time of undressing of the woman in the centre of the graveyard to the final act and orgasm. Aghors believe it is the duty of the man to delay orgasm until the ritual is completed.

  ‘A few decades ago, in the hippy era, many foreigners came to the Aghori centres in Varanasi. They thought they could use the ritual sex practices for ESP [extra-sensory perception].’

  A short time later and we’ve arrived at a squat white building bordered by a white fence. We enter the building to an unexpected scene: a plant-pot-scattered courtyard that could pass for a boutique hotel rather than a hospital. It’s ringed by simple whitewashed rooms.

  ‘So this is what I wanted to show you of the Aghors,’ says Aram, as Ashok smiles in kindly approval. ‘To show how their idea of embracing Hindu taboos can come to some good. This is Kust Seva Aghor Ashram. I first came here 15 years ago. It was a day that I will remember always. There were VIPs visiting Bihar at the time and, as many states do, the political cronies had run all of the beggars and lepers out of town with force, so the streets were clean for these VIPs.

  ‘After many hundreds of miles of walking, over 200 lepers had arrived here at Benares, hearing they’d receive welcome. Many of them had never received any medical treatment and were in advanced states of the illness. I was one of the young volunteers who came to care for them, relieve their suffering as we could. Many died in front of us. I will never forget it.’

  ‘Only a few lepers remain here now,’ says Ashok. ‘But when we set up as an ashram in the 1960s there were many,
many lepers. These were the decades after independence and the Indira Gandhi State of Emergency, and there were few medical facilities, and most of the hospitals that existed wouldn’t treat lepers, due to the stigma.

  ‘But we Aghors,’ he continues, beaming with pride. ‘We Aghors would treat them!’

  ‘They made it into the Guinness Book of Records in 1999,’ adds Aram. ‘They treated half a million lepers in 40 years… half a million!’

  Ashok and his Aghori sect have been a reminder that for every fringe belief in Hindu spiritualism there’s a moderate take on its teachings. Also, that the flipside to India’s organisation of life via taboos – against sex, the eating of meat, the wearing of black – is, of course, an Indian tradition founded on facing down taboos, from sex to death and leprosy. Nowhere is this truer than in Varanasi, a city of approximately 23,000 temples dedicated (among the many to Shiva) to everyone from Annapurna, the goddess of food, to a giant temple to Hanuman, the monkey god we met back at Amritsar.

  That night we take to the Ganges to experience another world record: Gunga Arti, a religious ritual-cum-party that’s taken place at one of the Varanasi ghats, Dashashwamedh, every night for, Aram speculates, ‘a thousand years’.

  We reach Dashashwamedh just as this eternal party’s starting. Crowds of upwards of a thousand have gathered on the ghat, mainly Indian pilgrims but also Westerners, the latter’s broader backsides commanding two seats on the narrow spectator benches. In front of us, the Ganges shimmers in deep black, like liquid midnight.

  Facing the river, and accompanied by the fluting tones of male temple singers, stand 15 novice priests, performing the Arti ritual.