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Love, The Living Spirit of Khajuraho
by Prof.
P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet
A Timeless Heritage
Khajuraho temples, now only twenty-four of the original
eighty-five surviving, are great shrines of love. Devastating winds, torrential rains, charring summers, rocking lands, rapacious hands of man, nature's cruelties and heavy booted feet of time spanning them inch by inch and layer to layer, deprived them much of their vigor - lips of their smiles, eyes of their glow, bodily curves of their passionate yearnings and gestures, and figures of their wholesome impact, but despite they are still amongst the finest works of art that man's creative genius might claim to have ever created on the earth. Whatsoever human imagination conceives, it will fall short of the magnificence that these stone structures breathe. These temples, clustering in three groups - Western, Eastern and Southern, are situated, about 172 kilometers east of Jhansi, at village Khajuraho in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh. Built by Chandela rulers from the ninth to the twelfth century, these temples abound in timeless quality, earning for them the status of world heritage monuments. Khajuraho is now for many decades world's one of the most visited monumental sites. Unique Architecture
Khajuraho temples, constructed with spiral superstructures,
adhere to northern Indian shikhara temple style and often to a Panchayatana plan or layout. A few of these temples are dedicated to Jain pantheon while the rest to Brahmanical - to God's Trio, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, and various Devi forms. A Panchayatana temple had four subordinate shrines on four corners and the main shrine in the center of the podium, which comprises their base. With a graded rise secondary shikharas (spires) cluster to create appropriate base for the main shikhara over the sanctum. Kandariya Mahadeva, one of the most accomplished temples of the Western group, comprises eighty-four shikharas, the main being 116 feet from the ground level. These shikharas - subordinate and main, attribute to the Khajuraho temples their unique splendor and special character. With a graded rise of these shikharas from over the ardhamandapa, porch, to mandapa, assembly hall, mahamandapa, principal assembly hall, antarala, vestibule, and garbhagraha, sanctum sanctorum, Khajuraho temples attain the form and glory of gradually rising Himalayan peaks. Illustration: http://www.exoticindia.com/artimages/shikhara.jpg?source=newageinfo.com An Unbroken Continuity of Love and Life
Not ashlars or stone blocks, but neatly carved and emotionally
charged handsome men, charming women, gods, apsaras, kinnaras, gandharvas, vidyadharas, yakshas, yakshis, ganas, dikpals, nagakanyas, shardulas and other mythical and celestial beings, engaged in singing, dancing, playing on musical instruments, embracing, kissing, or making love, carry these temples to their shikhara heights. Here stone, endowed with exceptional plasticity, melts into a wondrous world of emotions and passions, yielding forms and figures and rhythm and song, and there are now sensuous lovers, exalted dancers, enthused singers, maidens engaged in shringara, mothers caressing kids, Illustration: http://www.exoticindia.com/artimages/motherchild.jpg?source=newageinfo.com?source=newageinfo.com and many more who breathe life into the stone and now there is all of man and all of nature except the lifelessness which the stone symbolizes, or a single piece of stone, which has the face of stone. This unique transformation has made each stone sing, dance, blow trumpets, yearn in love, doze in slumber, eject from drowsiness, languish in passion, and burst with youthfulness, and now the stone not only has a soul within but also pours it out. It reveals dreams and realities of man and music of divines; and, thus, each temple becomes the festival of love and life representing their unbroken continuity. Pleasure, Not Pangs Define Khajuraho Concept of Love
Whether an exterior or interior, not an inch of temple space is
barren, without a couple populating it and celebrating love and life in all their shades and colors - mundane and transcendental, and hardly ever allowing any of them - love or life, to deprive a lip of its smiles or a face of its glow. They toil but it is all love's labor and it is never lost. Pangs of separation are as much a theme of love as is union, but Khajuraho temples do not know separation, nor they know old age, decay or death. They believe in life and in all its pleasurable blessings, and vehemently reject sorrow, thinking it, perhaps, only an attitude of mind. Hence, old age, decay or death is not the theme of Khajuraho sculptors. It is a world of fascinating youthful maidens and passionate robust males, a world of languished kisses, of lips unwilling to separate, and of arms interlocking into unlocking knots, - a world where they meet and love and discover meaning of life. They have amongst thousands of their men and women just a single figure of old man and a lone disabled, and he too engaged in coition. Illustration: http://www.exoticindia.com/artimages/jagdamba.jpg?source=newageinfo.com Yonder, a Wondrous World
One, when around these temples, would only think agape how fresh
The Divine Image Khajuraho artist's vision of the Divine, leaving aside the enshrining deity image - the iconographically symbolized spiritual element, is his vision of man. Strangely, the denizens of heaven and mythical world - gods, apsaras, kinnaras and others, who populate the sculptural world of Khajuraho temples, outnumber man, but rent by human emotions and passions, and even by animal instincts, they only represent the human model of divines. Hence, whether Uma with Mahesh, a Vishnu and Lakshmi-like looking divine couple, an apsara with a yogi, a nagakanya in attendance or a kinnari reciting a song, all are modeled with as passionate a bearing as ordinary human beings. Vishnu in his Varaha, boar incarnation has a boar's iconography and anatomy. The Khajuraho artist not only carves Varaha with boar's anatomy but also dedicates to him a temple; the deity has, however, a different set of mudrayen, gestures, more like someone in passionate love or exalted dance, such as has Shiva in his gyrating form. As love is the presiding spirit of all forms - divine or mortal, the gap between the two is itself dispelled. The Khajuraho artist has thus perceived the Divine with human frailties, and man as enshrouded in divinity. Illustration: http://www.exoticindia.com/artimages/varaha.jpg?source=newageinfo.com Love in Khajuraho art and in Indian tradition of Thought Khajuraho temples have hundreds of sculptures portraying various positions of coition and love making - a long and languished kiss; an unlocking excited embrace; the passionate male removing his partner's garment or she herself doing it; female, bitten by Kama, tossing and titillating or even the mukha-maithuna, as treatises call it; female partner riding her male by herself or assisted by others so that his organ penetrates into her with fuller pressure and to greater depths; male doing intercourse from behind, a typical posture of animals in coition; a yogi, a disabled, a bearded divine and other unusual players being engaged in coition; and, even animals being made the partners of the game, things which the modern mind would consider obscene and vulgar. Was it so also with the ancient man or with the man of early medieval era? perhaps not. The known traveler Ibn Batuta, whose travel memoirs have been a great source of Indian history, records to have visited Khajuraho in A. D. 1335. According to him, temples were always thronged by crowds of mahantas and common devotees. Obviously, people those days thought of sex and love differently. The Vedic Brahmanism - Shaivism and Vaishnavism, favoured family life and deified instinct of sex as Kama and the female in union with him as his consort Rati and held them in great reverence. Buddhism advocated renunciation and Jainism to its extreme. The Indian art vision was not, however, subservient to metaphysical principles of any of these faiths. The art tradition perceived temple as the microminiaturised manifestation of the cosmos. Cosmos is the manifest form and the outer frame of the Formless Supreme Who pervades it without and enshrines within. In exact analogy, the outer frame of the temple is the material manifestation of the cosmos, and as enshrines the Formless Supreme within the cosmos so the deity does within the temple - sanctum sanctorum. Obviously, this outer frame should have all that the cosmos has - all its passions, emotions, instincts, frailties, or even perversions. Hence, it is least surprising that Jain temples at Khajuraho have as much abundance of sex panels as have Brahmanical temples. The tradition may be traced back to Ajanta and in early Mithuna sculptures of Gupta art. Ajanta does not have scenes of coition, kissing or embracing, but in sensuous modeling of its female figures even this religious art is not far behind. In Brahmanical temples of Khajuraho, this aspect is more thrusting. Brahmanism divided life into four stages - artha, money, kama, sex or love, dharma, right path, and moksha, salvation and prescribed that one might neither attain right path nor salvation unless passes through the stages of artha and kama. Vaishnavism further widened the cult. It perceived love and creation as God's prime attributes. Hence, in human love Khajuraho artists discovered reflection of God's divine act. Shaivism conceived love as enlivening energy generated by union and interaction of male and female generative factors. Shaktism seems to have inspired the Khajuraho art most. Kaul Kapalika sect, a Tantrika expansion of Shaktism, emphasized that body was most intimately linked with mind and soul and, hence, the factors that motivated the body and charged inherent energies also charged and elevated mind and soul. Kapalika tantrikas believed that sex, instinct to love, Kama, was body's integral part, or rather its enlivening strength, major source of motivation, which charged in sexual union prepared body, and thereby soul and mind, for harbouring all pleasurable sensations which finally led to parmananda, state of transcendental ecstasy, when ego disappeared and self united with and merged into universal or cosmic self, and yoni-sadhana, methodically performed sexual union using principles of Yoga, was its most appropriate instrument, and Khajuraho, perhaps, its best laboratory. =========================================== This article by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of ancient Indian literature. Dr Daljeet is the chief curator of the Visual Arts Gallery at the National Museum of India, New Delhi. They have both collaborated on numerous books on Indian art and culture. =========================================== All photographs, unless otherwise mentioned,by Shri Rajbir Singh, Chief Photographer, Archaeological Survey of India. ------------------------------------------------------------ References and Further Reading: Daljeet, Dr. and Jain, P.C. Monuments of India (Delhi, Agra, Khajuraho, Jaipur): New Delhi, 2002. Desai, Devangana. Khajuraho (Monumental Legacy): New Delhi, 2003. Deva, Krishna. Khajuraho: New Delhi, 2002. Deva, Krishna. Temples of Khajuraho (2 Volumes): New Delhi, 1990. Poddar, Pramila. Khajuraho Temples of Love: New Delhi. |
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