The Khajuraho Temples

Let us deal with the sculpture first

Khajuraho is known worldwide for erotic sculpture, and the first thing worth saying is that it constitutes roughly a tenth of the carving on the site. The other ninety per cent is gods, celestial women, musicians, animals, battles, teachers, families, and the ordinary business of eleventh-century life rendered with astonishing observational precision.

The second thing worth saying is that no explanation of the erotic panels is settled. The serious proposals include: an expression of Tantric practice in which the physical is a route to the divine rather than an obstacle to it; a visual argument that kama, desire, is one of the four legitimate aims of human life alongside duty, prosperity and liberation; a protective or auspicious function, since such imagery was widely believed to avert misfortune; and a threshold statement — worldly life depicted on the outside of the temple, which the visitor leaves behind on entering the sanctum.

That last reading has the most going for it architecturally, because the placement supports it: the erotic panels cluster on the exterior walls and on the junctions between hall and sanctum, and there are none in the sanctum itself. Anyone who gives you one confident answer is over-claiming.

It is also worth saying plainly that the sculpture is not furtive or shameful in tone. It is carved with the same care, on the same wall, at the same scale, as everything else.

The architecture, which is the better reason to come

Khajuraho is the finest surviving expression of the Nagara style at its height, and the design principle is fractal.

Each temple stands on a high platform with no enclosing wall — unusual in India, and it means you walk around the outside of the building the way you would a piece of sculpture. Above the sanctum the shikhara rises not as a single tower but as a cluster: a central spire surrounded by dozens of smaller replica spires, each a scaled miniature of the whole, ascending in a rhythm meant to evoke a Himalayan massif with Mount Kailash at its peak.

Kandariya Mahadeva is the largest and the masterpiece — around 31 metres tall, with eighty-four subsidiary spires around the main one, and something in the order of nine hundred sculptures inside and out. Stand back from it before you go close.

The interiors follow a strict sequence — entrance porch, hall, vestibule, sanctum — each stage darker and smaller than the last, so that the building physically narrows you down to a single point.

How the site is organised

The temples fall into three groups, and most itineraries only cover the first.

The Western Group is the largest, best preserved, and the only ticketed enclosure. Kandariya Mahadeva, Lakshmana, Vishwanatha, Chitragupta and the Matangeshwara — which is still in active worship, and free to enter — are all here. This is where the light and sound show runs in the evening.

The Eastern Group is a short cycle-rickshaw ride away and contains the Jain temples, including the Parshvanatha, whose carving is arguably the finest at Khajuraho. That Hindu and Jain temples were built alongside each other under the same patronage says something worth noticing about the period. Free to enter, and almost empty.

The Southern Group is a further couple of kilometres out — Duladeo and Chaturbhuja, later and less visited. Chaturbhuja is the only temple here with no erotic carving at all, and it holds a fine 2.7-metre Vishnu image.

Lost, then found

Khajuraho's isolation is the whole story of its survival. The Chandela capital moved, the site was abandoned, and the forest took it. It sat essentially unvisited for something like five to seven hundred years — long enough that when a British engineer, T. S. Burt, was brought to it by his palanquin bearers in 1838, it was a genuine rediscovery.

The remoteness that emptied the site is also what preserved it. Temples elsewhere in North India were rebuilt, re-carved, re-plastered or destroyed; Khajuraho was simply left alone. The surface detail you are looking at is, to an unusual degree, eleventh-century surface detail.

Burt's own account, incidentally, is a small comic classic of Victorian discomfort — he found the sculptures 'a little warmer than was quite necessary'.

What to look for

The sur-sundaris — celestial women — on the wall brackets, caught in ordinary private moments: applying kohl, removing a thorn from a foot, writing a letter, playing with a child, looking at herself in a mirror. These are the finest things at Khajuraho and most visitors walk past them.

The elephant frieze on the Lakshmana temple platform, in which no two elephants are the same and several are doing something faintly comic.

The fractal spires. Photograph Kandariya Mahadeva from the west in late afternoon, when the miniature towers separate out in the raking light.

The Matangeshwara, which is not a monument but a working temple with a 2.5-metre lingam and morning worshippers — a useful reminder of what all these buildings were for.

The Parshvanatha in the Eastern Group, for carving quality, and because you will probably have it to yourself.