Images of Integration: The Temples of India and their "Erotic" sculptures
by Darielle Mason
Much like the Christian churches of Europe, there are particular fundamental concepts, a particular embedded symbolic organization, that tie Indian temples together, but there is also a wealth of architectural and sculptural variations. I will focus here on the temple type called nagara, which originated in and proliferated across northern India. Perhaps the best-preserved collection of tenth- through thirteenth-century nagara temples, as well as some of the most explicit depictions of sexual union, stands today at the well-known site of Khajuraho in central-northern India. The density of the almost life-size figures that cover the surfaces of such temples, both inside and out, looks at first glance like a huge, chaotic tangle of carved stone limbs. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. Every one of the many images, every architectural form, and every piece of surface ornamentation plays a symbolic and visual role in an amazingly well-ordered composition. Though each building, image, and even ornamental detail is individualized, the choices available to the builder-sculptors were strictly circumscribed; nothing is arbitrary.
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