The Porn of Khajuraho - Hemingway it ain't

If you bring the kids to Khajuraho, be prepared to do some potentially awkward explaining. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

By TIM SULLIVAN
Associated Press (ASAP)

KHAJURAHO, India (AP) _ Perhaps the oddest thing about Khajuraho -- and there are plenty of odd things about the cluster of ancient temples at the heart of this quiet tourist town -- is that people keep wanting to tell you it's not about sex.

This is, after all, a place with thousands of temple sculptures showing every imaginable form of sexual communion: There are men with women, women with women, and men with horses being watched by men and women.

Somewhere around the year 900, in the capital of the long-forgotten Chandela dynasty, scores of artists began carving an erotic kaleidoscope. The reasons why remain obscured by history -- perhaps it was a sexual guide, or maybe the carvings were rooted in spiritual practices. But eventually those artists covered dozens of temple walls with young women with come-hither eyes and figures that Barbie-doll designers wouldn't believe.

And they paired them with a gamut of partners.

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LIBIDO INCOGNITO

Taken together, the temples are an encyclopedia of sexual possibilities, from adolescent fumblings to the most complicated gymnastics. There are coy looks and roving hands and advanced techniques (a man, three women, a headstand) that must have required years of practice.

So what's with all the primness? Why does everyone insist they're not here -- and you shouldn't be either -- to look at the 1,000-year-old equivalent of dirty pictures?

The official Khajuraho guidebook doesn't mention the sexual sculptures until halfway through, and dispenses with them quickly. The complex's sound-and-light show, jammed nightly with tourists, goes on about long-dead kings for 50 brain-dulling minutes with only a brief reference to the ''sensuality'' of some carvings, and a warning not to get too excited.

''Appreciate their beauty,'' a priest intones during the show's voiceover, much of it given to the supposed conversations of ancient Indians, ''but be not impassioned.''

In some ways, it's not surprising to hear such talk in India. This country produced the Kama Sutra, the ancient book of sexual wisdom, more than 14 centuries ago, but modern India is a place tied up in sexual contradictions. It's a place where buxom actresses carouse in wet saris but refuse to kiss on-camera, where pornography is illegal but mainstream magazines regularly run titillating sex surveys, and where college women wear tiny skirts and halter tops but are still expected to be virgins when they marry.

Some of the sculptures at the cluster of ancient temples at Khajuraho. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

When it comes to Khajuraho's erotica, though, everyone seems to turn prudish.

Even the Lonely Planet, guidebook for masses of Western tourists, sounds as if it's giving a morality speech. ''Modern visitors are drawn as much for reasons of prurience as for cultural appreciation,'' it lectures. ''This is not pornography.''

Judging from the crowds on a sunny winter afternoon, though, most tourists are simply overwhelmed.

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EYES UP, MISTER!

Khajuraho is in an isolated corner of central India, and difficult to reach except by plane. As a result, visitors tend to be American and European retirees traveling in luxury tour groups.

By the time they reach Khajuraho, many had already toured India's sprawling capital, New Delhi, and the city of Varanasi, crowded with Hindus cremating their dead beside the Ganges River. India was becoming a smorgasbord of extremes, and Khajuraho was just one more entree.

On this day, many tourists looked stunned. Some seemed genuinely bored. A few affected the pensive look of academics, as if they were carefully studying the sculptors' techniques.

''It's too bad the carvings are so, you know, explicit,'' one gray-haired American told another as they waited outside one temple. ''Because it can make you overlook the quality of the workmanship.''

Baloney.

More not-so-subtly sexy sculptures at Khajuraho. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

If you aren't here to see the erotic carvings -- the sheer cacophony of sexual experimentation -- then clearly you're missing the point. I can't claim any knowledge of why the ancients built this place. But if the builders didn't mean for it to be about sex, then they played quite a joke on us.

So I stared, openly goggle-eyed. And I felt sorry for those who weren't staring. I'd seen plenty of photographs of Khajuraho, but it must be experienced in all its carnal glory to be understood. It's like the first time you stare over the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just can't capture it.

Thankfully, Rajesh Kumar Tiwari is here, because the longtime guide doesn't soft-sell the good stuff.

''You see this one?'' he said, pointing to one carving. ''She's doing masturbation, masturbating. She's playing with her breast ... She's a smiling, a smiling face.''

He says this with no lascivious smile, no wink, no smirk. Just a lot of fractured English and an occasional nonsequitur (''papaya is very good medicine for liver,'' he notes at one point, after explaining that the choicest breasts are between the size of a mango and an orange).

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See sexy, rock-hard abs like these. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

WHEREFORE ART THOU, ROMEOS?

Scholars still disagree fiercely about the origins of Khajuraho's erotica. Tiwari, like some historians, believes the sculptures served as instructional aides to young Brahmin boys being schooled in the arts of love. Others see them as illustrations of the Kama Sutra, or as lessons about tantra, an ancient spiritual tradition that sometimes included sexual rites.

In reality, there are plenty of other carvings at Khajuraho, depicting everything from farming to war to various Hindu gods.

But, Tiwari points out, of course your eyes are drawn to the sex. Just as the builders clearly intended.

''If there are 100 people somewhere, and some are dancing, some are singing a song, some are playing -- but if only one couple is there and making Kama Sutra, then everybody will look at that couple only,'' he said. ''Our mind will be divert to see the Kama Sutra, because this is a very important part of our life.''

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asap contributor Tim Sullivan is chief of AP's bureau in New Delhi, India.