Excerpt 1
CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER
If the Taj Mahal, with its timeless message of passion and its near empty surroundings, has whetted our appetite for love, our next stop seems the perfect segue. Heading back further in history to the sex temples of Khajuraho.
One thousand years ago, prior to the onslaught of the British and before them, the Muslims, various Hindu kings built religious temples in different parts of India that had some very unique characteristics. On the outside and inside walls of the temples were stone carvings depicting everyday life, including detailed carvings of human beings engaged in riotous forms of sexual intercourse and play. Today they are simply referred to as India’s sex temples. And the best sex temples were said to be those in Khajuraho.
Nobody could accuse the modern Indian of being “liberated” sexually. India, while the largest democracy in the world, is, nonetheless, a very traditional and religious culture where men still occupy the main place in society. This is my second time traveling through India and I can’t remember speaking to more than a handful of women about anything.
Over 90% of Indian marriages are arranged by the parents. Interestingly, most marriages last. Before the marriage the man and woman will not have had any experience even dating anyone. Dating between young men and women barely exists in India, save for the few well-heeled residing in urban centers. Beyond the rare couple holding hands, public displays of affection are not seen.
Indians also live in crowded conditions with huge extended families living in close quarters, making one wonder when couples here ever find a moment to even consummate their marriages. And with the way many Indian men often ogle at foreign women, you might think they have never seen any women other than their own mother.
The common impression this all leads to among foreigners who travel in India is that Indians appear to have rather prudish values. The more I see of India, however, the less sure I am that I agree with my fellow travelers. The first thing that makes me feel this way is the fact that there are so many Indians. With one billion people, India is the second most populated country on earth. Obviously some couples have been getting busy, since all these people did not just drop out of the sky.
Then there is the dress of the women. Indian women may not have a lot of money but what little they have they spend on looking their best. The flowing and beautiful sari, which exposes the midsection, has to be the most elegant attire for women anywhere in the world. Indian women wrap their bodies with outrageously bright and colorful saris. And they compliment their exquisite clothes by adorning their bodies with exotic earrings, nose rings, toe rings, bracelets and anklets. The result is a delight to look at, sexy in a sophisticated way, not a revealing way.
The other thing that has made me change my mind about Indian values is their history, one of the most colorful and storied histories known to humankind. Much of Indian history revolves around religion. To an outsider, Hinduism is a baffling religion. But one thing the Hindus of old obviously never suppressed, unlike other religions, was the subject of human desires and behavior. And one of the most notable, if not most intriguing human desire and behavior is, of course, sex.
Like anything that sounds this good, it isn’t about to come easy(can’t have one without the other?) Khajuraho is not the easiest place in the world to reach. The train from Agra to the busy, non-descript town of Jhansi takes three hours. In Jhansi we are to catch the bus for Khajuraho which, we’ve been told, will take another six hours.
The bus station in Jhansi provides yet another eye opening lesson in what happens in a land where there are simply too many people and not enough services to accommodate even a fraction of them. We wait at the station for the Khajuraho bus to pull in to the yard. We are the only foreigners in sight. The place is literally a mad house of humanity. We mill around in no particular line under a sign that reads ‘Khajuraho.’ I make sure we stand near the front of the pack, to ensure we get on the bus.
But the very second the decrepit old bus pulls in to the yard, the crowd goes positively ballistic. Several dozen men bolt from the waiting area and chase the bus down as it makes its curving entrance in to the yard. As the bus makes its wide angle turn, the men all jump up and grab on to an open window and throw their bag or pack inside to ensure themselves a seat. After doing this some guys get back down, but most simply climb inside an open window as the bus is still moving. It is clear we are going to have to take drastic measures to get on this bus.
As the bus pulls up to its slot, the chaos gets even worse. Nobody waits patiently for those on the bus to get off. In India services are so limited that you literally have to fight tooth and nail to get what you want. The waiting crowd rushes forward, jamming into the open door. Of course at the same time the crowd inside rushes out. The result is complete bedlam and gridlock, with people pushing, shoving, squeezing and shouting in a fruitless effort to get on and off the bus. The elderly? Nobody cares. Mothers with babies? Nobody cares.
And certainly I realize that if I bother to care, I will be stuck in Jhansi for the foreseeable future. So we immediately plunge in to the crowd, with me leading the charge. I use my height and weight advantage to brusquely shove several people out of the way. When that doesn’t work my green duffel bag does the trick. Several frail looking old people are trying to get on and off and I can see that they are caught in the fray, looking like they are seconds from simply keeling over dead.
And perhaps they do end up dying right then and there. I have no idea. All I know is that we fight and claw for ten minutes and finally get on to the bus and find some seats. Well, they are merely places to park our butts. There isn’t a space left when the bus pulls out and we sit packed in like elephants in a circus train.
In no time the city is left behind and we enter the central Indian plains, in the middle of absolute nowhere. The temperature outside hovers somewhere near a frightening 42 degrees Celsius and the parched plains literally sizzle. Inside the bus conditions are barely tolerable. For the first hour of the trip, my left elbow is stuck in an elderly lady’s ribs. Au complains that some man grabbed her ass. The road is paved but the driver lurches all over the place, barely skirting cows and goats hanging out by the side of the road and further deepening the depth of peoples’ limbs in to our bodies and ours in to theirs. After six and a half very hot, sweaty, miserable hours, we arrive in Khajuraho.
Late June prior to the monsoon rains is obviously not the ideal time for tourists in India. And for good reason. The heat is awesome. But it’s a dry heat, right? Yeh, so is a pizza oven. Thus, like Agra, this little out-of-the-way and isolated hamlet is devoid of people, which, of course, is the saving grace. (Again, you can’t have one without the other.) We can’t find a reasonably priced air con room, so we settle for one of the smaller hotels and their “air cooled” rooms. Which sounds lovely until we experience this contraption that the hotel owner is so excited about: A fan with water in a basin that is supposed to blow cooled air but simply blows hot air.
While it is now but a mere village, one thousand years ago Khajuraho was the capital city of the Chandelas, medieval Hindu Rajput kings who ruled over central India. The Chandela dynasty lasted five centuries before falling to the invasion of Islam. During their reign, however, the Chandel rulers built some of the most magnificent temples that the world has ever seen. In all they built 85 temples, of which 22 now remain.
Most of the temples are relatively small and, being right near the village, are easy to view. And within minutes you are provided a fascinating glimpse of the tolerant, enlightened and incredibly open-minded view that ancient Hindus took towards sex. The outsides and insides of the temples are covered with thousands of incredibly detailed stone and sculpture works depicting scenes from Hindu mythology, and life as it was a thousand years ago. The carvings depict gods and goddesses, people and animals in battle, musicians and, most notably, the Mithuna– sensuously carved figures of people having sex. And no body parts are spared in the carvings as testicles, erections and breasts are openly displayed. As the Lonely Planet guidebook puts it: “In the sexual Olympics, there would definitely be some gold medal winners here!”
Indeed. In one scene right at eye level, a group of people is having an orgy, with men and women in various positions of pleasure. There is another which is repeated on several temples showing a man standing on his head, while a woman mounts him from above, as two other naked and big breasted women assist in this impossibly acrobatic act. There are scenes of women and men fondling themselves as they watch others engage in intercourse. In one scene, a man, who obviously lost his regular mate, is doing it with a horse. And yet another sculpture, which must be seen to be believed, shows a man and woman performing oral sex on each other while both have their feet planted on the ground.
Often times there appears a voluptuously naked woman, called an Apsara, who poses like a model or performs daily rituals like washing her hair, carrying water or picking a thorn from her foot. Sometimes there are women being carried on the trunk of an elephant or kneeling to a ferocious Sardula, a mythical beast that looks part lion, part horse.
Why, you probably ask, would the Hindus put such unabashed eroticism on their temples? Did the Hindus actually live like this a thousand years ago?
Nobody is exactly sure of the answers. Some connect them with Indian sects who hold sex to be a religious exercise that can lead to self-deliverance. Some archeologists claim that the erotic figures were simply the product of the vivid imaginations of the stone carvers. Other scholars claim that the erotic carvings serve as a test of self control, that for a devotee to reach God, he must forget about all this temptation at the outset of his spiritual journey. Yet others have called them just plain decadent.
What is clear, however, is that these erotic carvings are not pornography in the modern sense, for ancient Indian Hindu culture never placed any taboo around sex, which to Indians, has always been quite a perfectly normal human function. The Indians, of course, were responsible for the fabled manual of love, the Kama Sutra. Hindus consider kama, or pursuit of pleasure, as one of the four legitimate aims in a person’s life.
It was while perusing a pile of books in the small bazaar inside the massive Moghul Red Fort in Old Delhi that I stumbled upon something called “The Stream of Indian Culture,” by Indian writer Nirmal Kumar. Honestly I have no idea why I decided to buy this book. But I took it with me to Khajuraho and began to read it. Turns out this somewhat long-winded treatise on ancient Indian culture discusses the ancient sex temples of India. Good karma must have been flowing that day.
Kumar spends several chapters writing about the ancient sex temples and their meaning. He claims that the sex was portrayed exuberantly in temples and sacred books, “lest certain prudish elders should try to conceal this dark and supposedly shameful part of life from the young.”
“In India,” he writes “the erotic was not denied, but openly accepted as a symptom of a deeper craving, the craving of opposites to be one. Sex was raised to a spiritual level. The complete flowering of the erotic was the same as the flowering of the soul. It was not an appetite, carnal and mean, but the throbbing of the soul to attain its highest destiny. When understood in depth and brought to true flowering without any obsession, sex had no ends other than the highest, in fact, the same ends as the longing for freedom and beauty.”
Well, if you don’t think traipsing around with your better half through the ancient sex temples—all proudly displaying the exuberance of sex—does something for your love life, then I suggest you get over to India and elbow a few old ladies in the ribs and try it out sometime. The June heat may surely be brutal, but it’s not nearly as hot as the heat radiating from the walls of those temples.
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