Temples at Khujaraho

The temple complex at Khujaraho shows the best Hindu carvings I have yet seen and I would recommend the place to anyone is interested in the subject and has time to spend a day there. I had heard a lot about the erotic carvings there, and they are interesting, but there are maybe 10-20 erotic carvings among several thousand. The carvings show scenes from many aspects of human life, and Nandan tells me that one of the themes of the artwork is the human experience in cosmic context.

More interesting than the temple complex is what is happening at the lake touching the complex. Temples are often associated with some lake, and these temples are associated with this lake. India has monsoon weather so most of the year’s rain comes in just the summer months. For this reason, most ground reservoirs of water have human construction around them to enable use at different water levels. Most frequently this means building ghats, which are staircases which lead to the bottom of the lake or river. In the monsoon season the stairs become completely submerged and out of sight. As the water level lowers throughout the year more and more steps must be used for people to walk down to the water.

The ghats at this lake near the temples at Khujaraho have been recently rebuilt. It seems that to save money on stone and concrete a large number of ancient, completely intact sculptures have been used to create steps intended for human trampling. These sculptures have been untouched for 1000 years and any museum in the world would love to have them as either objects of art or as teaching tools to promote understanding of Hindu culture or history.

I am sure that if they are not soon rescued then within a few years they will be destroyed.

It was kind of surreal that after a day of seeing this huge temple complex and all these problems with the sculptures we stopped at some restaurant that served all the typical Indian food plus banana flambé.