Some people, when I asked then, merely repeated to me what the guidebook was saying about the eroticism. The book had devoted a thousand words to the subject while saying nothing at all. One excuse was that eroticism was used to satisfy a certain god who was deemed to be a voyeur, and thereby to seek his mercy. What an unlikely story! Most modern politicians seemed to have acquired the same talent to say nothing at all in an avalanche of gushing rhetoric lasting for hours, or to conjure up the most imaginative fairy tales.



      One person that we talked to discovered that the quality of the sculptures increased the higher they were located. He had brought his binoculars along. Most of the locals, though, seemed detached from the artwork, as if the sculptures did not matter. The guidebook told us that people had actually utilized many sculptures from the more than 60 ruined temples as a kind of ready-made cheap building material for their houses. The book also pointed out that a lot of the materials of the broken temples had been used for building roads.



      One local boy in his teens that we talked to joked that the ancestral builders must have had sex several times a night to have needed so many positions for lovemaking as were graphically displayed. Another boy suggested that the rulers couldn't find enough women so that they had to invent ways to make do with what they had. The boy suggested that the sculptures might have been erected for the benefit of all who found themselves in the same predicament.



      It was nearly as interesting to observe the tourists than to see the sculptures themselves. Some of the sculptures of course are amazing works for art. Some tourists were examining the details as if they held the key to a mysterious puzzle. Hundreds came to the temples while we were there. A few people shook their heads quietly and walked on. Other tourists simply rushed through as one might hurry through an art gallery in 20 minutes before doors close at the end of the day. How else would they be able to 'take in' 22 temples and make the next plane connection on time? They probably saw none of them really, though they had everyone of them ticked off in the guide book.

      A few people I overheard were commenting on the 'link' between the technological and cultural advances that India had made after the end of the first millennium. They saw a connection. The two young women compared the spices of India to the Indian love making positions and began to snicker.

      Many of the tourists seemed to be disappointed that the eroticism wasn't 'expressive' enough, as if they had expected western pornography. The expectation might have been instilled by travel promoters. Instead they found only pure beauty in human form and no perversion. They had come to see temples of perversion and found none. The temples certainly weren't a cabaret of pornography cut in stone and designed to excite human sexual elation. The Hollywood curvaceous female body was missing from these sculptures, although some female features were exaggerated. I felt that the temples were designed to take the sexual into a higher realm of beauty where the worth of mankind unfolds. The temples weren't diminishing the physical dimension of sex but acknowledged it as but another element of the beauty of life while they hinted at a spiritual dimension of lateral intimacy.



      According to the guidebook the 'experts' were as widely divided as the tourists on the issue of why the sexually explicit sculptures were created in the first place and what they represented. One group of experts called the old kings 'sex crazy.' They called them decadent, perverts who for ages had lived in obscene luxury. But these experts didn't explain why only 10% of the sculptures were erotic. Other 'experts' suggested that the temples were built for sex-education, but they seemed to ignore that long distance tourism was not a common feature in ancient India a thousand years ago, although Khajuraho was the capital of a great kingdom at the time.

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche