The sacred and sensuous in Indian art

Paintings and carvings in ancient Indian temples challenge Western ideas of the relationship between spirituality and sexuality, says writer and historian William Dalrymple. In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party, lost in the arid mountains of the Western Ghats, made a remarkable chance discovery. Following a tiger into a remote and narrow river valley, the hunters stumbled onto what was soon recognised as one of the great wonders of India - the painted caves of Ajanta. On the walls of a line of 31 caves dug into an amphitheatre of solid rock, lie the most ancient and beautiful paintings in Buddhist art, the oldest of which date from the 2nd Century BC—an otherwise lost golden age of Indian painting. Along with the frescoes of Pompeii, Ajanta represents the greatest picture gallery to survive from the ancient world and the most comprehensive depiction of civilised classical life that we have. About the author *. William Dalrymple is a writer and historian The Ajanta murals tell the Jataka stories of the lives of the Buddha in images of supreme elegance and grace. The artists produced images that subtly explore a wide variety of human situations, from ascetic renunciation through portraits of compassionate Bodhisattvas of otherworldly beauty swaying on the threshold of Enlightenment, through to more earthy scenes of courtly dalliance in long lost ancient Indian pleasure gardens. Although the images were presumably intended for a monastic audience, the Buddha tends invariably to be shown not in his monastic milieu, after his Enlightenment, but in the courtly environment in which he grew up. Here among handsome princes and nobles, dark-skinned princesses languish love-lorn, while heavy-breasted dancing girls and courtesans are shown nude but for their jewels and girdles, draped temptingly amid palace gardens and court buildings. These women conform closely to the ideas of feminine beauty propagated by the great 5th Century playwright Kalidasa, who writes of men pining over portraits of their lovers, while straining to find the correct metaphors to describe them: "I recognise your body in liana; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks... alas! Timid friend- no one object compares to you." As the great Indian art historian Vidya Dehejia puts it, "the idea that such sensual images might generate irreverent thoughts did not seem to arise; rather the established associations appear to have been with accentuated growth, prosperity and auspiciousness." That is why the monasteries of Ajanta were filled with images of beautiful women - because in the eyes of the monks this was completely appropriate decoration. Murals in the temple at Ajanta When I first saw these caves at the age of 18, it was this that gave me pause for thought. Why, I wondered, would a monastery built for celibate Buddhist monks be decorated with images of beautiful, bare-breasted palace women? Returning last week after a gap of 30 years, I was again struck by the same thought. In the Christian world, this was the middle of Lent, the season of self-discipline and self-deprivation, but here I was in the middle of a celibate monastic community which had voluntarily chosen to live the austere ascetic path in small rock-cut cells, and yet was making a deliberate decision to cover the walls of its religious buildings with images of attractively voluptuous women. The figures of Gods and Goddesses are shown in such obscene Postures, that it would puzzle the Covent Garden nymphs to imitate them 18th Century European traveller in India I am hardly alone in being surprised by this. Westerners coming to India have always been baffled to encounter a very different set of attitudes to the sensuous and its relationship to the sacred. Here it is considered completely appropriate to cover the exterior walls of a religious building with graphically copulating couples. Christianity, in contrast, has always seen the human body as essentially sinful, lustful and shameful, the tainted vehicle of the perishable soul, something which has to be tamed and disciplined - a fleshy obstacle to salvation. A decade ago I remember spending another Lent in the austere desert monasteries of Coptic Egypt. It was here, in the dying days of the Roman empire, that Christian doctrines about the inherent sinfulness of the human body were first formulated. In opposition to the classical Roman love of sensuality, the early Christian monks set out to mortify their bodies and fight off all the temptations of the flesh. It is only by defying your urges and casting off the body, the Coptic monks maintained, that you can attain perfection. We are dust and to dust we shall return. These attitudes have never entirely left the Western Christian tradition. Inside the caves of Ajanta