At the top of the world

Shiva and Parvati caress

Each caress lasts a century

for the god and for the man

an identical time

an equivalent hurling headlong

~ Octavio Paz, Wind From All Compass Points

The Khajuraho temples, situated in the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, are now a UNESCO world heritage site. According to a report in Hindustan Times, members of Bajrang Sena under the leadership of its president of the Khajuraho unit, Jyoti Agarwal, approached Chhatarpur police on Tuesday, complaining against the alleged selling of Kamasutra books and figurines considered obscene inside the premises of the Western Group of Temples, including the tourist canteens. Agarwal is reported to have said, “Such things affect the image of Indian culture and traditions in the eyes of the foreigners… Whatever has been depicted can’t be allowed to happen here now. What sort of moral values are we passing on to our younger generation? These temples have religious significance. There is a Shiva temple here. How can you allow Kamasutra to be sold in the sacred premises?”

This is a bizarre attempt to sanctify the meaning of the Khajuraho temples, and speak of the Kamasutra as if it is defiling. In the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, the distinction between the sacred and the profane are dissolved. Eroticism is not regarded profane but a sacred measure of the divine. Yet the sculptures aren’t only about divinity. Built between 950 and 1050 CE, legends have it that the Chandela king, Chandravarman, was persuaded by the goddess in his dream to build the shrines. They were mentioned both by the Persian historian Al-Biruni as well as the Moroccan traveller and scholar, Ibn Battuta. Among the 85 temples, only 25 survive today. The temples faced a long period of vandalisation after Qutb-ud-din Aibak of the Delhi Sultanate annexed the Chandela kingdom in the 13th century. After long years of obscurity, the shrines were rediscovered in the 1830s with the help of the British surveyor, T.S. Burt.

Among the many works based on these erotic shrines, Shobita Punja in Divine Ecstasy: The Story of Khajuraho, mainly based on the ‘Shiv Purana’, sees the shrines as a representation of the divine marriage between Shiva and Parvati. Devangana Desai’s The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho is a more complex scholarly work, where she interprets the written and visual language in the shrines as “double-meaning” codes of the tantric tradition. She carefully dissects the complex erotic poetry and imagery, full of puns and double-entendres, depicted in the shrines. In fact, the Sanskrit word for pun, slesha, Desai reveals, also means “clinging or adhering to… union (also applied to sexual union)”. In fact, the ancient name of Khajuraho was Kharjuravāhaka, the carrier of date palms, which also has a deep sexual connotation. It is amply clear that the Chandela kings, who were moon worshippers, had built the most unique temples in history, where moral and cultural demarcations between religion and frank eroticism were blurred to produce the most exquisite artistry on stone. Some interpretations suggest that the women depicted in the sculptures are ‘devadasis’, young temple girls used for religious service. There are enough studies about the (sexual) exploitation of these devadasis. It offers a complex historical picture behind the feminine figures in the Khajuraho sculptures. Vātsyāyana was a Vedic scholar and the Kamasutra celebrates kama or sexual pleasure as the necessary stage and pursuit of youth. There is a cultural correspondence between the Kamasutra and the Khajuraho sculptures, where dharma, kama and earthly moksha (bliss) intricately intersect. To argue that the presence of an ancient text on sexual mores violates the sanctity of the stone sculptures is a refusal to see them as different versions of engaging with the art of sexuality. The Shiva in the Khajuraho temples is the amorous god in the company of his beloved, Parvati. There is no moral distinction or quarrel between Shiva, the god in love, and Shiva, the ascetic. The celebratory aspect depicting sexual art, both in its divine/spiritual and mortal/material form, need to be seen in images of likeness rather than rupture. To treat the Kamasutra as something shameful in relation to Khajuraho is to infuse a moralistic distortion that has no connection with the bold and heterogeneous imagination of the past. Perhaps it is this very disconnection that allows a pseudo-morality and understanding of old religious cultures to face the absurd trials of modernity.

The historian and diplomat K.M. Panikkar had called the Khajuraho shrines a “degeneration of the Hindu mind”. Where does such a prejudiced perspective come from? Panikkar’s sexual moralism comes from the peculiar, lingering conservatism of modern sensibility regarding sexual mores and artistic representation. If frank eroticism is degenerate, wonder how we may define repressed sexuality. In contrast, a poet-intellectual like Octavio Paz delved into the mystic eroticism of Khajuraho with a much more nuanced sensibility. “The entwined bodies of Khajuraho,” Paz writes in Conjunctions and Disjunctions, “are like those commentaries of a commentary of a commentary of the Brahma Sutra: the subtleties of the argument do not always add up to real profundity, which is simple.” Paz offers a subtle critique by suggesting, in Khajuraho “eroticism reaches the point of being monotonous.” He finds either “happiness or death” is missing in those sculptures, something that he discovers in the Buddhist monuments in Bharhut and Karli.

Nothing I had not known about Khajuraho prepared me for the sheer wonder of the shrines when I visited in the winter of 2014. I ended up feverishly writing a slim volume of short poems when I returned to Delhi. I imagined what the figures reveal of sexuality, eroticism and the body, challenging our perception of the past as well as the present. I also thought on the disfigurement of the sculptures by those who were in violent denial of the body. Here is a small sample of a few poems:

Khajuraho: Poems

I

The first shrine

Stood expunged from place

And time.

A solitary marvel of a nameless

Nowhere

Rescued from hammer, rust and darkness

To recover the sun

On its body of parched stone

II

Nymphs and lovers

Eyes closed over centuries

You are awake to pleasure

But deaf to history

What can you tell us of history?

You lived centuries –

Breathing of hands

That sculpted your body

Of luscious stones

You were born of eyes and laughter

You are the proof of mortal arousals

For mad divinities

What can you tell us of history?

You witnessed your

Destruction

Wordlessly –

Only time heard you

Sigh

You were dreaming your past

Your body of frozen butterflies

Dreaming in forests unsheltered

From marshy nights

What can you tell us of history?

So many interpreters out there analyse you

Reading the broken signatures of your body

So many birds draw near to loose feathers

Gawking at your fixed tepidities

Can you tell us of your history?

We who ask you to tell your history

We live in the iron laws of our time

What can we tell you of your history?

III

The ascetic flanked

By amatory couples

His silence flanked

By amorous noises

How does he meditate?

Shiva & Kama

Rule side by side

Momentary

Harmony

Amidst

Perpetual

Discordance

The Chandela kings

Commission

A truce

A unity of opposites

Divine names

Mortal bodies

Play for a century

With rasas

Till hammers

Stun the bliss

V

Bodies of shrines

Are broken

Bodies of shrines

Speak in broken bodies

They echo amputations

– Sappho’s poetry

De-faced

De-bosomed

De-limbed

Face-less bosoms

Bosom-less faces

Missing organs

Speak in pieces

Missing

In altars of love

My eyes bandage them

VI

If you want to see

The intense beauty

Of a single bosom

Go to Khajuraho.

Gods die in the shade

Of that single bosom

VII

Khajuraho

Once Kharjuravāhaka

Men carried date palms

Women bore scorpions

Addicts made love

To poison-bearers

Who planted what in whose body?

Kharjuravāhaka:

The ancient carnival of ruses

Its inhabitants rendered

All worships – amorous

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee teaches poetry at Ambedkar University, New Delhi. He is a frequent contributor to The Wire and has written for The Hindu, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Outlook and other publications.