The problem with sex...

...is that, like irony, once you see it in one place, it seems to pop-up everywhere! 

I’m at the Western Temple complex in Kajuraho (said cadge arow). There are 7 temples, each bearing many explicit, finely crafted reliefs of sex in a joyous multitudinous variety of different forms and positions: oral, anal, men and women, animals, men and animals and male and female masturbation, upside down, back to front, front to back. Some sex seems to be formulaic, dutiful, composed. Some is lustful and abandoned, some surreptitious, some is amorous and sensual, some not so; a man sodomises another man, another stands watching, wanking, whilst a wailing woman raises her eyes to the skies and covers her face in her hands. Strangely, these are interspersed with almost 3-D statues of what appear to be carvings of straight-faced, serious looking men, women and deities, most of whom seem to ignore the sexual abandonment going on all around them. But hang on. I’m not so sure about that. Why the wry smile from that man over there? Is he acknowledging the amorously look from his partner? Where is the hidden arm of the man with the lady who are both staring, straight-laced, out over my head into the distance beyond? Is that the flicker of a smile on her lips? Is that man’s hand gesturing towards a woman’s breast? Is that woman kneeling before a writhing dragon giving it a blow job? Sex here is funny, disruptive and anarchic, spilling over, encouraging the viewer to see it everywhere and subverting everything with its energy.

Whilst the sex is about 3 metres above the base of the seven temples, each also carries a linear narrative relief nearer the ground. I thought that, by circumnavigating each temple, I would quickly interpret the stories. And so it seemed. There are some disagreements, then minor skirmishes, there is preparation for battle, some last minute tooing and froing between the opposing leaders, the large, brutal battle itself and then victory dancing, singing, drumming, flute playing, feasting, more music. The stories around the other temples are more complex and harder to understand and when I arrive back at the first temple again, hoping to reassure myself with the simplest of narratives I’d constructed, it is not there anymore. I have lost the original plot. Instead it, or rather I, am clouded with complications and tangents. There is a long march after the battle which I’d missed, there is another meeting where things are exchanged and there is an animal which seems to whisper into the ear of one of the chiefs, there are lines of birds. What I thought was familiar and straight forward is now not so.

The level of intricate detail that remains for temples over one thousand years old is astonishing. The site was abandoned soon after its construction, invaded by the Afghans, who ironically proceeded to enact in real life some of the scenes of destruction gestured towards on the temples themselves, validating a notion of history, in part, as a struggle for money and land. As a sign of that superiority, the invaders did what invaders seem to do the world over, which is to break many of the statue faces within reach, defacing them to sheered flatness, erasing identities and personalities. But defacing is tiring work and there are so many of them that the vast majority remain, laughing, marching, fighting, loving, eating, music making and fucking, in a vibrant, life affirming, exuberant resistance.

 

 

The worst public road I have ever, ever been on. The trip to Satna to catch the train took 4 hours to do 104 km, lurching from one least bad pot hole to another. Avoiding pot holes takes precedence to driving on the right side of the road. Believe me, those coaches take NO prisoners. None. Not one!