The Hindus (76 page)

The temple as a whole was conceived as a replica of the Himalayan peak of Mount Kailasa, the home of the god Shiva.
¹⁰⁵
Most of the individual scenes and figures, exquisitely carved, depict Shiva and Parvati, but there is also a magnificent image of Durga killing the buffalo. The artists even went so far as to carve,
under
the temple, at the bottom of the whole colossal edifice, the image of Ravana being trapped by Shiva under Mount Kailasa,
¹⁰⁶
a scene also carved at Elephanta. But the Ellora version has a difference, which echoes the bold negative carving of the temple as a whole: The image of Ravana, connected to the mother rock only at his knees and his many arms, is otherwise completely detached from the background and carved in the round.
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Ravana is thus finally separated from the rest of the monument and left connected to the dark underworld from which the artists had freed the temple, the “mother rock” that gave birth to everything else but held him back. Later
Ramayanas
, beginning in the Tamil tradition, tell of a shadow Ravana (“Peacock Ravana,” Mayili-Ravana) who lived in a shadow universe under the earth,
¹⁰⁸
like this Ravana underground at Ellora. We might also see the Kailasa temple as an image of the upside-down world that Trishanku created.

KHAJURAHO AND KONARAK

Two other great temple complexes deserve our consideration here; though both were built somewhat later than the period covered by this chapter, they are best understood in the context of Tantra. The images in the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak are solid evidence of the wide spread of sectarian worship at this time, and some of the Shaiva sects represented there were Tantric.

Khajuraho, the capital of the small kingdom of Bundelkhand that the Chandellas ruled, was a busy cultural center where poets, grammarians, and playwrights rubbed shoulders with affluent Jaina merchants and court officials.
¹⁰⁹
Monastic Hindu establishments that arose and grew powerful during this period encouraged the kings to build extravagant temples between 900 and 1150 CE.
¹¹⁰
The great complex of twenty-five temples at Khajuraho and the smaller, exquisite temple in the shape of the chariot of the sun at Konarak, as well as other temples in Bhubaneshwar in Orissa (and in Assam and Katmandu), are noted for the carvings of couples in erotic embraces—often called
maithuna
figures—that decorate their outer walls. Some of the couples are quite demure, gently kissing or fondling each other, but others are in full sexual penetration, “making ingenious love,”
¹¹¹
some in positions that the
Kama-sutra
warns can only be mastered with practice.

The Temple of the Sun at Konarak, in Orissa, decorated with such figures, was built by the young Narasimhadeva I (1238-58 CE), allegedly to please his mother (a strangely Oedipal gift). It is entirely in the form of a chariot, and the sun is depicted on it in miniature, with his own charioteer driving his seven horses, another instance of the whole replicated within itself. Enormous, three-dimensional animals—kneeling elephants crushing warriors and warhorses overwhelming demons—flank the chariot that is the temple, and a frieze depicting both wild and tame elephants, as well as amorous couples, encloses the lower wall. “Colossal stone wheels, each intricately carved, were positioned along its flanks and a team of massive draught horses, also stone-cut, reared seawards, apparently scuffing and snorting under the strain.”
¹¹²
Though images carved on the temple show the Man-Lion (Narasimha, one of the avatars of Vishnu) worshiping images of Durga and Jagannatha (another form of Vishnu), it is dedicated to the worship of the sun (Surya), a Vedic god who still had the power to inspire the ruling family to construct this monument.

Less explicit (i.e., noncopulating) erotic figures are carved on many other Hindu temples throughout India. (Even Buddhist stupas are often graced by the buxom tree spirits called Yakshis or Yakshinis and the gorgeous courtesan nymphs called Apsarases.) These more muted erotic scenes are a part of the attempt to represent the whole of the material world on the outer walls of temples, both to celebrate the beauty of the world and, perhaps, to gather up all the sensual forces there so that the worshipers can leave them behind as they progress deeper toward the still center of the temple. Such images promise the worshiper the blessings of fertility as well as eroticism. Three levels of eroticism are depicted with very different degrees of prominence: The sexy women are the largest images; the amorous couples are not nearly so large; and the scenes of group sex, stylized and geometrically arranged, are smaller still. The few obscene friezes are very small indeed and placed at difficult-to-spot places, perhaps a private joke on the part of the sculptors who carved the temples.

The actual
maithuna
couples on Khajuraho and Konarak also partake of these general powers of fertility but may be meant to invoke, in addition, the magical efficacy that the sexual act was supposed to have to protect monuments, which may explain why the erotic images are often placed at the ritually vulnerable parts of temples.
¹¹³
Alternatively, the images may have been placed at meeting points of buildings so as to play on “a visual pun between juncture and copulation.”
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The erotic couples on these temples are often said to be Tantric; Khajuraho was an important center for various Tantric sects,
¹¹⁵
and the Chandellas were probably Tantrics.
¹¹⁶
A few friezes at Khajuraho and more in Assam may be specific references to Tantric rituals.
¹¹⁷
For on them, the positioning of the couples (and sometimes groups of three or more) agrees with details of some Tantric texts. Some of the gorgeous women seem to be not Yakshis or Apsarases but Tantric Yoginis, more particularly in some temples the sixty-four Yoginis that the Tantras speak of,
¹¹⁸
some with animal faces.
¹¹⁹
The significant number of Yogini temples constructed between the eighth and twelfth centuries lends weight to the argument that these were the places where Tantric rituals took place.
¹²⁰
One art historian has commented on the “curious paradox” that some of the temples at Khajuraho “can only be fully appreciated today by being viewed from the air.”
¹²¹
Were they meant to be viewed by flying Yoginis?

The Chandellas built one temple at Khajuraho at the time of Mahmud of Ghazni’s first invasion of India
¹²²
and the Khandariya Mahadeva temple, the greatest of them all, during the subsequent Ghaznavid invasions, though the invading forces never came near Khajuraho. While temples were not necessarily built in response to these invasions (they are equally, if not more, a response to the erosion of Vedic ritual and the rise of new forms of sectarian worship), the building of temples took on new meaning in the presence of Islamic kingdoms and armies. The temple carvings abound in martial themes—warriors, weaponry, elephants, big horses rearing and leaping.
¹²³
To the limited extent that temple building is a political act, these temples eloquently express the Hindu rulers’ defiance of the Muslim invaders.
¹²⁴

It is perhaps puzzling that though the erotic images on these temples would have been anathema to pious Muslims, they were never the victims of Muslim iconoclasm. They may have been spared because the Ghaznavids did not get to Khajuraho and the Mughals got there only after the Chandellas had deserted the temples, which had then faded from prominence and weren’t marked on Aurangzeb’s maps.
¹²⁵
The Orissan temples, as well as the temple of Jagannatha at Puri (built during Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, in the late tenth to late eleventh centuries),
¹²⁶
may have escaped because they were too remote to attract Muslim attention. Or could it be that the Muslims, who were, after all, themselves past masters of erotic poetry and painting, cast an appreciative eye upon the carvings and simply rode by?

CHAPTER 16

Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names of Rama and Rahim, which mean to me the same god. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.

Mahatma Gandhi, 1947

 

The prophetic words of Gandhi, which he spoke just nine months before he was killed, apparently with those names on his lips,
^ih
turn the more cynical words of Kabir on their head. It would be good for us to keep the two sides of this paradigm in mind as we consider the history of Hindus among Muslims in India. As Hindus responded to the various cultural transformations wrought by the Muslim presence, new religious ideas also arose to challenge the Brahmin imaginary.

In dealing with all but the earliest periods of Indian history, we gave up even the semblance of tracing any single historical center and settled for a selection of peripheries. We still have those peripheries, more than ever, in both the Hindu and the Muslim worlds, though now we also have two moments when there are serious contenders for a center, first the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire. But even when there was a center for government, there was never a center for religion. Here, as so often, the main action, and the main evidence, are to be found not so much among the ruins of Delhi and in the chronicles of its sultans as in the records and remains of a dozen other capitals scattered across the subcontinent—Jaunpur, Ahmedabad, Mandu, Chitor, Vijayanagar, Gaur, and many others.
²
Both the Hindu and the Muslim rulers are plural, not only in generally succeeding one another rather quickly but in being very different one from another. The messages from Delhi were therefore very different at different periods, and so were the messages sent back to Delhi.

Just as the term “Hindu” dissolved upon closer examination at the very start of this story, so now does the category of “Muslim.” Historians often invoke terms like “Hindu kingdom” in contrast with “Muslim sultanate,” but “Hindu” and “Muslim” are seldom the most basic way to distinguish one group from another. For religious differences were often overridden by differences in language, ethnicity, food, clothing, and much more. Most of our sources refer to ethnicities, not to religion; the Hindus generally thought of the Delhi sultans and their people not as Muslims but as Arabs and, later, Turks, often confusing the two groups, calling them all (Arabs as well as Turks) Turks (“Turuskas”) and regarding them all, like all non-Hindus, as barbarians (
mlecchas
). The Hindus also had very different attitudes toward the rulers, on the one hand, and the resident traders and clerks, on the other; though some Turkish or Arab rulers destroyed Hindu temples, breeding lasting resentment, the ordinary Muslims who worshiped in mosques and Sufi shrines were seldom a problem for Hindus, who had high regard for most Arab and Turkish traders, particularly horse traders.

The terms by which Hindus (more precisely, the people we call Hindus) referred to the people we call Muslims suggest assimilation rather than hostility. The term “Mus-ala-mana” (“one who submits to Allah”) is seldom used; this left Hindus the options of designating Muslims by their different ethnic and spatial origins or by using any of several generic terms for non-Hindus. Inscriptions and Sanskrit texts have no single term for the foreigners that the Hindus knew, but use Yavana (“Ionian” or “Greek”),
mleccha
(“barbarian”), and Turuska (“Turk”) interchangeably for Greeks, Persians, and Turks. There is irony in the fact that the stereotype of the Turk who destroys temples and idols, appropriates the temple lands of Brahmins, and eats beef became so clichéd, so generalized to the Terrible Other,
³
that the Kashmir chronicle, in 1148 CE, describing a
Hindu
king who plundered temples and had excrement and wine poured over the statues of gods called him a Turk (Turuska).
⁴