Khajuraho-Sex and Divinity

As the weeks pass since our return India begins to take a more settled shape in my mind; the sheer bewilderment induced by the experience is in decline. I thought I would add some more information from time to time on the variety of things we saw. I could begin with the Taj Mahal, the great masterpiece of Islamic art, but I’ve settled instead on another monument, a little less well known, but one that combines aspects of both the sacred and the profane-the Hindu temples at Khajuraho.

Lost and neglected for many centuries, the temple complex at Khajuraho in the state of Madhya Pradesh was built by the Chandella Dynasty in the tenth and eleventh century AD and then abandoned soon after for reasons that have never been adequately explained. There are three main complexes-the western, the eastern and the southern-covering an area of several square miles. For the days we were there we hired a guide to take us around, a better way of discovering things and significances that we might otherwise have missed.

Those who have been will know just how perplexing the whole thing is, with carvings representing a multitude of activities, a multitude of experiences, human, divine…and superhuman! Lakshmana Temple, the oldest among the western group, dating back to the late tenth century, is really splendid, full of the most wonderful carvings, anything from soldiers and dancers, camels and elephants, to a man doing a rather unspeakable things with a horse!

From there we went to the Kandariya Mahadeva Temple, an eleventh century construction and, in simple visual and architectural terms, by far the best of the western group. It’s here that the erotic reliefs achieve a particular intensity. There is one particularly beautiful carving of a couple having sex, assisted on either side by female attendants. This really is the Kama Sutra at its most acrobatic, with the male figure seemingly standing on his head! Inside and outside there are also carvings of all sorts of figures celebrating the marriage of Shiva and Parvati; there as guests, attendants or protectors. I loved the figure of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, and the Sapta Matrikas, the seven mothers, responsible for the dressing of the bridegroom.

I should add that the carvings depicting sexual encounters in all their variety-and believe me, variety is the operative word-are all to be found on the exterior of the temples, in clear separation from the sanctum sanctorum. And as to why sex was depicted by the Chandellas in such a vivid and unforgettable manner there is simply no clear and generally accepted explanation. Some have suggested that it shows a link with Tantric cults; others that it is pornography offered for the entertainment of the Gods. All I will say is, as always, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there!

In the eastern group the temple that impressed me most was that of Parsvanath, included now within the Jain collection. There is a particularly fine carving here of Brahma and Vishnu, his consort. Even more beautiful was Kama, the love god, with his quiver of flower arrows, embracing Rati, his own consort.

In all we spent four days exploring the area, though it really requires more time to make sense of it all. But, in the end, I don’t suppose one human life is really enough to understand India properly, to understand all that the country has to offer. History lies heavy here.

Elizabeth and the Catholics

Official attitudes to Catholics in Elizabethan England were, to begin with, fairly fluid, with patterns of conformity and dissent dictated as much by local considerations as by national policy. It was quite possible for people to be Catholic in some aspects of their lives, though not in others; conformist and non-conformist at one and the same time.

This flexibility gave way to more rigid attitudes in 1571, by which time the Church of England had given firm expression to its Protestant doctrine in the Thirty-Nine Articles, while the Council of Trent gave a far stricter definition of what it meant to be a Catholic, forbidding any kind of participation in heretical services.

At that point the whole question moves from one of faith to one of politics: the conflict and contradiction between loyalty to one's faith and loyalty to one's nation. Even so, it is important not to place too much weight on Pius V's Regnans in Excelsis, declaring Elizabeth to be a pretender, as most English Catholics made open and sincere declarations of loyalty to the crown.

Still, for obvious reasons, it made the general position of recusants that much more problematic. The government became more vigilant, though action against priests was restricted to the new cohort emerging from Douai College, and not the surviving native or Marian priests, who were allowed to continue with minimum interference. In 1585 all priests ordained abroad and returning to England were declared guilty of high treason, and those who helped them of a felony. At the same time the pressure of the recusants became more systematic.

It was possible for ordinary people to remain Catholic-and a great many did-though the financial penalties for doing so became ever more burdensome. By the end of Elizabeth's reign in 1603, while it is difficult to give precise figures, Catholics comprised no more than about 2% of the total population in England, more numerous in some places than in others. The most secure were the upper class and noble Catholics, those who could afford to pay the recusancy fines. But the faith survived also among sections of the working population. They survived, with difficulty, yes, but without the wholesale persecution that was the fate of religious minorities on the Continent.

A Tale of Two Tyrannies

There were similarities between the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic inasmuch as they were both based on a rejection of the liberal tradition; both based on a single ideology and a monolithic ruling party; both on the same coercive forms of social control.

But the differences were far greater than the similarities. National Socialism was regressive and backwards, defined as a repressive cult of power, and no more than a cult of power. The GDR, even at its most oppressive, drew its logic and inspiration from transcendent notions of human liberation, which made its internal contradictions all the greater. It was forced constantly to dissimulate, prevaricate and explain; to justify itself by forms of ideology in every sense alien to that of National Socialism. The Nazi state, moreover, was based on an unstable combination of charisma and mass engagement. The GDR was based on boredom and bureaucratic torpor. One died of excess; the other died of senility.

The Boring Reich

Paul Anton de Lagarde was one of those misty-minded right-wing intellectuals, ever in pursuit of nebulous notions of 'spiritual renewal'. This, he believed in the period before 1871, would come with German unification; that the creation of a new nation would also entail the creation of a new, more elevated type of human being. But the reality of the Second Reich came nowhere near his expectations, making his disappointment-and his reaction-all the greater. Indeed, he went so far as to argue that Bismarck's creation was the very antithesis of what he had looked for; that it was more likely to bring collapse rather than spiritual renewal. Quite simply, it was boring! The new Reich was stultifying; it crushed the individual beneath its stolid sobriety, and thus annihilated the only source of cultural vitality-"Everything depends on the human being, and Germany lacks nothing so much as men; there is nothing toward which Germany, with its adoration of the State, of public opinion, of Kultur, and of success, directs so much hostility as toward the individual, who alone can bring it life and honour

The Possessed-On the Psychology of Terror

I found Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism to be altogether fascinating insight into the ‘psychology of terrorism’, a non-fiction account that might very well be set alongside Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for the insight they all give into a certain mode of thought.

It's worth stressing that people are often motivated not by grand principles, but by forces altogether baser, more visceral and more personal; excitement, the thrill of danger, social envy and simple resentment all coming before the grand abstractions of politics or religion. Take the case of Emile Henry, a French anarchist, who threw a bomb into the Gare Saint-Lazare Restaurant in 1894, killing one of the diners and seriously injuring twenty more. His motive was to show that the bourgeoisie that their "pleasures would not be untouched", though almost all his victims were workmen.

There is also Vera Figner, the Russian Narodnik, who became a terrorist in part to escape the restrictions placed upon her as a woman. Or there is the example of the young men in the contemporary Muslim world, trapped by chronic unemployment, for whom radical Islam offers a way out…as well as new jeans and cool trainers.

In the 1970s the actions of the German Red Army Faction might be said to have emerged from the 'boredom of privilege' than any meaningful political grievance. In Italy one former member of the Red Brigades, an organisation which killed hundreds in the 1980s, revealed his own motives-"Arms have a fascination of their own. It is a fascination that makes you feel in some way more virile...this sensation of feeling stronger, more manly...I found myself...showing them to women to try to impress them."

So, there you have it. And as Burleigh points out the one thing that unites the German and Italian left-wingers with present-day jihadists is not the thought of Marx or Muhammad, but a fascination with gangster films and splatter movies. Did you know, for instance, that in the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan one favoured form of relaxation was to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger movies? Well, now you do!

Some Thoughts on Operation Barbarossa

I wrote the following as a response to a question on how close Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, came to success. It seems appropriate to save it here now we are close to the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

How close did the German invasion of Russia come to success? Far, far closer than many people care to allow. The suggestion that the whole thing was a piece of political and strategic madness by Hitler, pushed most assiduously after the war by Franz Halder, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, among others, does not stand up to examination. His own wartime diaries reveal that he was as keen on the whole operation as anyone. As early as 3 July he wrote, "It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in a space of two weeks".

We now known, from documents released by the Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that this was a view that even Stalin was close to accepting. At the end of that month one of the agents of Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, made attempts through the Bulgarian ambassador to discover if Hitler would accept large territorial concessions in return for peace. The Russian historian, Dimitri Volkogonov, has also uncovered evidence to suggest that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, was actively preparing for a second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had ended Russian involvement in the First World War. The thinking seems to have been that of Lenin in 1918: trade territory for political survival.

The real crisis came in October after the great enveloping battle at Vyazma and Briansk, the opening move of the final advance on Moscow, where the Germans took 660,000 prisoners, leaving a mere 90,000 men to face the whole of Army Group Centre. It is even rumoured that some Moscovites put out welcome posters for the Germans. Zhukov later reported that Stalin was more desperate than ever for peace. He was also on the point of leaving Moscow. Document No. 34 of the State Defence Committee, dated 15 October 1941, and now in the public domain, shows just how serious Stalin believed matters had become. It is resolved, the document proceeds,

To evacuate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the top levels of Government...(Comrade Stalin will leave tomorrow or later, depending on the situation)...In the event of enemy forces arriving in Moscow, the NKVD are ordered to blow up business premises, warehouses and institutions which cannot be evacuated, and all underground railway electrical equipment.

The following night an armoured train made ready to carry Stalin east.

Nevertheles, it is by no means certain that the Soviet Union would have fallen even if Moscow had been taken; but it would have given the Germans crucial control over the whole Russian transport network. More than that, the collapse of Russia's ancient capital, and the flight of Stalin, is likely to have had the most devastating effect on both morale and fighting ability. If Stalin was a coward, it has rightly been written, then everyone could be a coward.

There are two things surely that saved Russia at this most crucial point in its history; the decision of Stalin, for reasons yet unkown, to remain in Moscow, and crucial intelligence forwarded from Tokyo by Richard Sorge, a Communist secret agent, that the Japanese were not going to attack Russia, not at least until after Moscow had fallen. In a huge gamble the guard on Manchuria, occupied by the powerful Kwantung Army, was dropped, and the Siberian divisions moved west. If Sorge had been wrong it is difficult to know how the Soviet Union could have survived. But he was not wrong. Zhukov deployed his fresh units to the north and south of Moscow. For once it really is appropriate to say that the rest is history

Meeting Michelangelo

Most people going to Rome will want to visit the Sistine Chapel, accessed through the Vatican Museums. If one intends to pay proper respects to Michelangelo it is important to find out exactly when the Museums open and get there an hour or so beforehand. Now, once in, make straight for the Chapel, ignoring all of the wonderful distractions on the way; these can be admired later. Inside the Chapel, and hopefully alone, one can stand in silent awe before The Last Judgement, long before the twittering crowds arrive. :))