Khajuraho was the capital of the Chandelas who built 85 temples between 900–1150 CE. The 25 that survive are now famed for their fine sculpture, including graphic sex on their walls. In the late first millennium, such temples arose across India, at Badami, Mathura, Konark, etc. Who built them and why? What sort of a worldview puts explicit sex next to their gods? How did a dominant religious culture that glorified austerity, renunciation, and asceticism as the path to God, accept such sexual imagery—on temples, no less? And how did Indians of that era turn into today’s woeful prudes easily scandalised by such erotica, no hint of which appears on their modern religious monuments?
Clearly, Indian religious culture then was very different. A key difference was Tantra, whose pre-historic roots go back to non-Aryan folk traditions. Tantra revered the idea of fertility, and saw sexual love as a path to spiritual progress and liberation. Rising from below, Tantra fused with Jainism, Buddhism, the Puranic sects of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta, and inspired sexual imagery on their monuments. The sex-positive, anti-caste, and goddess-centric folk culture of Tantra was also the soil that sustained the secular hedonism of the elites and the Kamasutra. But then came a huge conservative blowback within Hinduism that decimated Tantra. Discover the lost world of Khajuraho, the influence of Tantrism in early medieval India, and its decline.
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