Boy, you can tell they haven’t been to Khajuraho recently. Khajuraho’s Hindu temples, among the finest examples of Hindu art, are 1,000 years old this month. India’s president just launched a yearlong Khajuraho Millennium celebration, complete with a special postage stamp, to commemorate the anniversary. But there’s one little detail that might bother the Hindu moralists: the temples are decorated with what amounts to one of the most explicit sex manuals ever assembled. Lesbianism is one of the tamer themes. Thousands of figures run in long friezes around the 23 temples. The intertwined men, women–even horses and dogs–combine in exuberant multiples and mind-boggling, backbreaking sexual permutations.
Sexuality has long been a theme in Indian art, which often portrays naked Hindu gods and goddesses. But the Khajuraho temples, by far the most explicit, have shocked visitors for more than 150 years. Capt. T. S. Burt, an English soldier posted to India with the East Asia Company, rediscovered the temples in 1839. They had been abandoned some 550 years earlier, and were saved by the jungle from vandals and looters. “The sculptor allowed his subject to grow rather warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing,” he wrote. Some carvings, he said, were “extremely indecent and offensive.” Ever since, tourists have swarmed to the site to be shocked–and seduced–by the beauty of the temple.
Why the Khajuraho sculptures are so sexually adventurous is a mystery. They were built by the Chandellas, a warrior clan who ruled for about 300 years. Some scholars argue that the carvings glorify the mystic marriage of the great god Siva. Others say the friezes depict tantric Hinduism, which believes that sex generates mystical energies. Historian Romila Thapar points to the fact that the Chandellas’ rule coincided with the decline of the puritan influence of Buddhism. They may simply have been a decadent group who partied for three centuries, then collapsed in exhaustion, leaving the temples as a record of their fun. “It was an age of abandon,” writes Thapar.
The Hindu moralists will probably try to ignore the celebrations at Khajuraho and the free-thinking, uninhibited Hinduism its temples portray. But this year it may be hard to avoid Khajuraho entirely: when sexual conservatives go to mail their next letter, they just might have to lick the new millennium stamp–which, of course, has a very naked Khajuraho nymph on it. Will they storm the post offices?
