Incidental erotica

Khajuraho is the all-too fleshly skeleton in India's cultural closet of schoolgirlish priggishness.

Like many others of a pre-Internet generation, I learned about the unseemly things that adults do without their clothes on from a set of little plaster images that my parents brought back from a trip to Khajuraho. And unlike the child-bride in the television soap Balika Badhu, who beheld the sculptures and went from shock to awe to a delighted revelling in the revelation, I had no such epiphany. I thoroughly disapproved. Almost 30 years later, finding myself fairly unchanged from that early priggishness, I thought it time to revisit Khajuraho — that all-too-fleshly skeleton in India’s cultural closet.

 

Khajuraho was delightful in every possible way. In October, the land is lush, the rivers and reservoirs swollen from the late monsoon, the days flushed with the oblique light of the pre-solstice sun. Our carriages in the train were a special charter by The Lalit Hotel, resplendent with new red carpets and silk tissue curtains, and smoked clean of the resident cockroaches that patrol the Indian railways. Cushioned on fat down pillows and swaddled in freshly laundered white linen, cossetted by a task-force of red T-shirted youngsters intent on practicing ‘Limitless Hospitality’, the Lalit mantra; we were gently rocked across a green plain to the edge of the beautiful Vindhyachal hills.

Khajuraho is a village. No malls, no traffic jams, not even a cinema hall. Just these temple sculptures in yellow sandstone, warmed by the sun and by a small but stiff measure of adult content. Exteriors are minutely carved to a lightness that is scarcely believable — alive and swarming with gods, warriors, nymphs, animals, changelings and musicians — and yes, lovers, often a whole group of them, locked forever in polymorphous play. Yet the erotica seems incidental, easy to miss in this vast narrative of surging life. Why, if we didn’t have the venerable Mr Sahu, our guide, to helpfully highlight the X-rated stuff with his nifty little hand mirror which he used as a light-pointer, we might have missed it almost altogether. Many profound insights into Hindu thought were offered on subjects such as a gang-bang, and all was proceeding sedately until the horror of hearing the C-word (for female anatomy) spoken by those septuagenarian, Brahmin lips, without so much as a flicker of his yogic features!

Yet, there is no escaping the compelling beauty of this place. The unending unravelling of stories carved in stone locks you in a spell that awakens places in the soul. The incredible detailing — the creases in the flesh, the fingernails, droplets of water on skin, the mark where an apsara scratches her foot, the transparent folds of saree; the optimism of young, rounded, bejeweled bodies; the humour of animals observing human drama; poses are languid and expressions soft whether at prayer, or sex or in the face of violent death. Then there are moments — such as when the morning sun pierces a temple doorway, penetrating deep into the garbha griha to bathe a marble Shivling with morning light while the rest of the chamber is in shadows. Those are moments of holiness even for the unbeliever.

And ironically, because these are not living temples but monuments under the ASI, and hence there is none of the crowd, stench and grime that mars Hindu worship — their holiness is more tangibly preserved. One does not need to suspend the mind to communicate with a higher intelligence.

The Lalit Hotel among its many charms is the only hotel here that is exactly adjacent to the Western Group of Temples, the biggest group. Its courtyards look out over the temple spires, just a five-minute walk away. Twice a year the Lalit, a tastefully understated boutique hotel clubs a four-day getaway with an arts festival organised by it. Tied in with an all-inclusive package that includes the wonderful train ride to and from Delhi, it’s one of those rare, truly perfect and painless holidays.

All of Khajuraho was a delightful surprise — the laid-back villages and bastis with their clean lanes and well-fed cows are surprisingly unspoilt by tourism. It’s a great place to scrounge for authentic antiques because this is where Delhi’s big antique dealers come to look for artefacts they can then reproduce by the thousand. Around the temples are the usual huddle of curio shops selling, what else, but quantities of erotica. Little boys crowd around selling brass keychains of couples/threesomes/foursomes/even the odd bout of bestiality/auto-erotic monkeys — all with little levers that set them off energetically about their business. And like the sagely Mr. Sahu, there is nary a snigger from either the children or the yokels. So, the next time we hear Western tourists rave about our Kama Sutra liberalism, let’s not tell them about the Sri Ram Sene…

The all out sensuality of the temple sculptures puts you in the correct frame of mind to indulge yourself at the Lalit’s superb spa — for the body, Mr. Sahu says, is the temple of the soul and must be beautified. And massaged, scrubbed, mud-wrapped, steamed et cetera. Who are we to disagree? With Pam, the Lalit’s resident psychic and new age guru, who read our tarots, sussed out our auras and checked out our angels, we discussed the possibility of The Lalit offering packages for couples that included workshops on tantric sex, given that Khajuraho is thrumming with the appropriate vibrations… But Pam looked at us doubtfully, prescribed crystals to cleanse our base chakras and sent us on our way.

All around is the relatively undiscovered beauty of Madhya Pradesh, the very large heart of India — forests, tigers, forts and tribes. An easy drive from the hotel is a sight so stunning that it is shocking that one has have never read or heard of or seen a photograph of before — the Raneh Falls, tributaries that hurtle down a hundred feet of volcanic rockface to empty into the Ken. It’s hard to describe the sheer scale and drama of the frothing falls, the dark green river, the black granite canyons, the clear still pools — all of this hidden from view by forest, like a secret place. But as it turns out this was the spot where Rekha, the actress emerged from the foam in all her dripping splendour and little else, for the movie — what else, Kama Sutra!?

Back in Delhi, none of our friends would accept our keychains. They looked at us and politely asked us to put them away before the children saw them. I suspect that’s how it was with the Chandella kings who built these temples deep in the forests, far from their capital cities… Unabashed love is not of this world, it is practiced in the secret places of the mind.