Index of articles, click here.
India: The Place of Sex
By Carl Cardiff
By William Dalrymple
There is something wonderfully frank and direct about these gods who embody human desire. Lord Shiva reaches out and fondly touches the breast of his consort, Uma Parvati, a characteristically restrained Chola way of hinting at the immense erotic powers of a god who embodies male fertility. Elsewhere, Hindu sculpture can often be explicitly and unembarrassedly erotic, as can much classical Hindu poetry Kalidasa's poem The Birth of Kumara has an entire canto of ninety-one verses entitled "The Description of Uma's Pleasure," which describes in graphic detail the lovemaking of the divine couple.
But with the art of the Cholas the sexual nature of the gods is strongly implied rather than directly stated in the extraordinary swinging, dancing rhythm of these eternally still figures with their curving torsos and slender arms. This is not just a modern reading: contemporary devotees from the Chola period who viewed images of the gods enraptured by their consorts' beauty have left graffiti asking the deities to transfer the sensual ecstasy they experience to their followers.
There is reason to believe that some of the images of goddesses were modeled on actual Chola queens, and physical grace and sexual prowess seem to have been regarded among the Cholas not as private matters but as vital and admired attributes in a ruler. When the dynasty was first established in Tanjore in 862 AD, the official declaration compared the conquest of the town to the Chola monarch's love sport
He, the light of the Solar race, took possession of the town just as he would seize by the hand his own wife who had beautiful eyes, graceful curls, a cloth covering her body, in order to sport with her.
As this inscription indicates, sexuality in India has traditionally been regarded as a subject of legitimate and sophisticated inquiry. It was looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics: srngararasa the erotic rasa, or flavor being one of the nine rasas comprising the Hindu aesthetic system. If the Judeo-Christian tradition begins its myth of origin with the creation of light, the oldest scriptures of the Hindu tradition, collected in the Rig Veda, begins with the creation of kama sexual desire: in the beginning was desire, and desire was with God, and desire was God. In the Hindu scheme of things, the gratification of kama remains one of the three fundamental goals of human existence, along with dharma duty or religion and artha, the creation of wealth.
Classical India developed a refined and tutored sophistication about the finer points of sexuality, famously so in the Kamasutra, the principal work on love in Sanskrit literature. It has never been equaled; yet there has always been a strong tension in Hinduism between the ascetic and the sensual. The poet Bhartrihari, who probably lived in the third century AD, around the time of the composition of the Kamasutra, oscillated no less than seven times between the rigors of the monastic life and the abandon of the sensualist. There are two paths, he wrote.
"The sages religious-devotion, which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth, and the lusty undertaking of touching with one's palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely-limbed women, loving women with great expanses of breasts and thighs."