Nine Lives(75)

Elsewhere, Hindu devotional sculpture can often be explicitly and unembarrassedly erotic: across India can be found medieval Hindu temples whose exterior walls contain graphic scenes of oral and group sex—most famously, and inventively, at Khajuraho and Konarak. This same sensuousness is also there in the startlingly beautiful Tamil poetry of the period:

Her arms have the beauty

Of a gently moving bamboo.

Her eyes are full of peace.

She is faraway,

Her place not easy to reach.

My heart is frantic

With haste

A ploughman with a single ox

On land all wet

And ready for seed.



Or again:

My Love

whose bangles

glitter, jingle,

as she chases crabs

suddenly stands shy,

head lowered,

hair hiding her face;

but only till the misery of evening

passes, when she’ll give me

the full pleasure

of her breasts.



To some extent, none of this is a surprise. Sexuality in India has always been regarded as the subject of legitimate and sophisticated inquiry. Traditionally it was looked upon as an essential part of the study of aesthetics: sringara rasa—the erotic rasa, or flavour—being one of the nine rasas comprising the classical Hindu aesthetic system. The Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, which tends to emphasise the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity, begins its myth of origin with the creation of light. In contrast, the oldest scripture of the Hindu tradition, the Rig Veda, begins its myth 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, kama remains one of the three fundamental goals of human existence, along with dharma, duty or religion, and artha, the creation of wealth.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the same erotic concerns found in the secular poetry of classical India are equally evident in the devotional and religious poetry of the period: Kalidasa’s poem The Birth of Kumara, for example, has an entire canto of ninety-one verses entitled “The Description of Uma’s Pleasure,” which describes in graphic detail the lovemaking of Lord Shiva and his divine consort. The poetry of the Tamil saints, who walked from temple to temple in the region during the early centuries AD, singing and converting the local Jains and Buddhists, likewise dwells at length on the sensuous beauty of the deities they adore. The boy saint Sambandar, for example, was especially taken by the loveliness of Uma-Parvati, who, it was said, had taken human form and suckled and comforted him when, as an infant, he was left crying on a temple ghat, while his father went off to bathe:

Smooth and curved,

her stomach

like the snake’s

dancing hood,

her flawless gait

mocks the peacock’s grace.

With feet soft

as cotton down

and waist

a slender creeper.



Nor was it just the female deities who were imagined as magnificently sexual beings. The saint Appar, a convert from Jainism, wrote with equal sensuousness of Lord Shiva in his incarnation as the Enchanting Mendicant, a form of the god particularly popular with the Cholas and sculpted on the walls of many of the great Chola temples. In this poem, Appar imagines himself as one of the girls who falls in love with Shiva in this form of the beautiful beggar, whose stunning good looks could entrap any woman whom he approached with his begging bowl:

Listen my friend,

yesterday,

in broad daylight

I’m sure I saw

a holy one.


As he gazed at me

my garments slipped

I stood entranced,

I brought him alms

but nowhere did I see

that Cunning One—

If I see him again

I shall press my body

against his body

never to let him go,

that wanderer

who lives in Ottiyur.



If Chola poetry is sometimes explicit, then in Chola sculpture the sexual nature of the gods is strongly implied rather than directly stated. It is there in the extraordinary swinging rhythm of these eternally still figures, in their curving torsos and their slender arms. The figures are never completely naked; these divine beings may embody human desire, but unlike the sculpture at Khajuraho, the Chola deities, while clearly preparing to enjoy erotic bliss, are never actually shown in flagrante; their desire is permanently frozen at a point before its final consummation.

The distinctly sensual charge of the bronzes is not just a modern reading: devotees from the Chola period who viewed images of the gods enraptured by their consort’s beauty left inscriptions asking the deities to transfer the sensual ecstasy they experience to their less fortunate followers. There is reason to believe that some of the images of goddesses were modelled on actual Chola queens—a Parvati in the Tanjore Museum is one example—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 both god and ruler. When the dynasty was first established in Tanjore in AD 862, 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.” What was true of rulers was also true of the gods, and there are many bhakti devotional poems apparently inspired by the feelings of a poet-devotee lost in an intense sensual-spiritual swoon before the beauty of an idol in a temple: