22 December 2015
Of all the places we have visited so
far, Khajuraho was the most overrated destination so far. I had expected to
discover many more nuances about this city and its culture, but it seems to me
that there isn’t much more than what has been published about it already. The
only other culture on display was one in which touts chased tourists to sell
their wares. The city is essentially a dust bowl, and a few temples from the
Chandela Empire. The temples are pretty, no doubt, but the few that have
remained have been so overexposed that there is almost no sculpture one hadn’t
seen before in pictures. The sculpture of Varaha – the third avatar of Vishnu
as a wild boar – was most impressive. One that I had not seen before, the
sculpture was a stylised representation of a boar. The stone is minutely
sculpted to bear distinct representations of about a thousand gods, goddesses
over its body.
Given that there wasn’t much to the
city, we decided to make two trips to the western group of temples. We spent
most of yesterday minutely observing the sculptures on each temple by
ourselves. Today we decided to revisit the temples but with the help of a guide.
It was good to be able to take our time, and not be overwhelmed by the sheer
scale of things, as we were at Ellora, but at least for me, there was too
little.
Yesterday, there was a large group
of police officers who had come to the temples for a department outing. While
the younger officers giggled a lot, I overheard a conversation between two
seniors who were not very impressed. One lamented: “Agar hum Indian log hi itni gandi-gandi cheezey hamaray mandiron par
dikhayenge, toh yeh foreigners ko hum gandagi phaylanese kaise rokenge?”
[How can we successfully prevent these foreigners from perverting our society,
if we Indians ourselves show all this filth on our temples?]. It was almost a
flashback to the play “Dekho Magar Pyar Se” at Thespo on Day 1, but this time, only
in the real world, and not in a theatre.
For a country in which the sex is
still taboo, there is perhaps still some shock value in seeing the erotic and
acrobatic sculptures of tantric meditation, bestiality, and common copulation,
in the stone. But then, for a country in which sex is taboo, it as interesting
that almost all attention be focussed on these 4% of all sculptures, as it is
that the population explosion, is most pronounced here.
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Today we met another traveller,
Andrew from Canada, who had arrived in Khajuraho from Benares. He reacted
rather sharply when I told him that we were going to stay in Benares for four
nights. According to him, anything more than two days in Benares was a waste.
This disappoints me very much. I hope our stay in Benares does not turn into a
second Khajuraho. So far, the journey has been a bit further from a discovery of India. I feel less like a
traveller and more like a tourist. There hasn’t been more to do than visiting
tourist attractions in Aurangabad and Khajuraho, and we lived in the lap of
luxury at Satpura. I have been mystified by Benares for a long time, and had
expected it to be the capstone of this journey. In my mind, Benares – founded
as Kashi by Lord Shiva in 12th Century BC – was going to be the ancient
city where history met with the present, the city where one could explore the
myth of India as really as possible. Andrew suggests otherwise. I hope he is
wrong.
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