Konark Sun Temple

When Man Singh built his palace at Gwalior, he rashly assumed eight wives were going to be sufficient. Throughout the zenana – the women’s quarters – his architects had designed eight of everything, in accordance with the latest marital count.

I don’t know what the maharajah was thinking. The life of an Indian prince was based on the premise that there was no such thing as enough when it comes to sexual partners. No sooner had the last lick of paint been applied to his splendid palace than he met Mrs Singh number 9, a village beauty who caught his eye at a well in the forest. He was obliged to call the architects and set them to work on a new palace at the bottom of the garden to house his latest conquest.

In the deserted Dancing Hall of Man Singh’s palace, where there is now just the faintest odour of bats, you begin to wonder. Wives were only the tip of the iceberg. Nobody seemed to keep track of the concubines, the courtesans, the dancing girls. It is all very well admiring the tilework, the beautiful stone fretwork, the lovely cupolas in Indian palaces. But what really draws the eye is the size of the harem.

I was travelling to Khajuraho, the famous temples whose reliefs have been called the Kama Sutra in stone. I had the idea they might help to explain what really went on in the mirrored chambers of the harem, among the cloistered concubines and the pampered princes. I tried to see it as an educational jaunt.
Gwalior was the first stop on my road to sexual discovery. I was staying in a lavish guesthouse built for the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1887. Given its size, it would seem that their host, the Maharajah of Scindia, assumed that the royal party would be travelling with a considerable harem. Imagine his disappointment when the Prince of Wales turned up with a single wife.

The maharajah’s own palace lies just across the road. Built in European style in the 19th century, it makes Buckingham Palace look cramped. One wing has been opened as a museum. It proves that royal excess was not restricted to the harem.

There are mountains of Belgian glass, quarries of Italian marble, wagonloads of gilt. There are enough tiger skins to carpet an airport terminal. There are Rolls-Royces, German bubble cars and ornate state carriages. In the banquet hall, a miniature silver train ran round the table with cigars and decanters. Above the table are twin chandeliers that weigh three and a half tons each, so heavy that nine elephants had to be taken up on the roof to check it would take the weight.

And naturally, in a building whose harem may not have fallen far short of triple figures, there is a room of erotica where an enthusiastic Leda is having her way with a swan. I thought of it as prep. It was hot, but not Khajuraho hot. The most erotic sculpture in India lay ahead of me.

In these regions, building palaces for guests is something of a tradition. In Datia I paused to visit the fabulous palace built by a local ruler in the early 17th century for the visit of the Mughal emperor Jehangir, a man who wouldn’t disappoint when it came to consorts. It had seven storeys and 400 rooms, and took eight years to build. Unfortunately, Jehangir only stayed one night. He missed a treat. In its topmost room – a pavilion of winds with ceilings covered with murals of Krishna playing with his numerous girlfriends – the emperor would not have felt out of place with a handful of bed companions.

JUST UP the road in Orchha was another palace built for Jehangir. Deep in rural India, Orchha is now little more than a village. From the pavilions and balconies high up among the roofs of its two palaces, one looks out over fields where bullock carts trail dust into the dry distance. Along the banks of the river, women in bright saris were washing clothes beneath the chhatris, the cenotaphs for the royal dead. In the other direction, one looked down on the village roofs and the Ram Raja temple with its busy forecourt of pilgrims, all desperate for the intercession of the gods.

One can imagine the young women of the harem up here, peering down through the stone lattice screens at a world that was lost to them. Some may have enjoyed the pleasures and status of the harem. For others these ornate palaces were a prison.

Palace architecture, with its repetition and rhythm, seems to insist on the erotic tone. There are the sensual surfaces – marble, polished stone, glazed tiles. There is the slow progress, a kind of unfolding, to more and more intimate chambers. There is the love of secret nooks, of peekaboo seeing without being seen. And, finally, there are the furnishings – the rich silks, the crushed velvets, the endless cushions and divans. Sprawled among the soft furnishings, it must have been difficult to keep one’s mind on affairs of state when the most beautiful women in the kingdom were twiddling their thumbs upstairs in silk pyjamas.

Gwalior, Datia and Orchha are all pleasantly obscure Indian destinations; you are likely to wander alone among the ruined palaces and temples. Though Khajuraho too is little more than a village, it is one of the most popular destinations in India. Sex sells; don’t count on a private viewing.

Much about Khajuraho remains a mystery. It was an important centre of the Chandela dynasty, contemporaries of the Normans half a world away. They were great temple-builders, and may have erected as many as 85, most of them over a 100-year period, from AD950 to 1050. Only 20 remain.

After the Chandela decline in the 13th century, Khajuraho fell into obscurity and it was this that probably saved the temple reliefs from Muslim invaders who were in the habit of desecrating figures, especially those caught with their trousers down. The temples didn’t come to the attention of the outside world until Captain TS Burt of the Bengal Engineers heard of them from one of his bearers in 1838. He found them buried in jungle.

In his report for the Royal Asiatic Society he enthused about the beautiful and delicate workmanship of the carvings, but warned his readers that the sculptor had allowed his subject to grow rather warmer than was absolutely necessary. “Indeed some of the sculptures were extremely indecent and offensive,” he wrote, wondering that a religion could allow such “disgraceful representations to desecrate their ecclesiastical erections”.

According to the guidebooks, the exquisite stone reliefs depict the everyday life of 11th-century India. There are two things you can’t help but notice about everyday life in 11th-century India. First, everyone was gorgeous. Second, they spent a great deal of their time shagging.

Everywhere you look, beautiful women pose and preen like pin-ups. Long-legged, lithe, and clothed in little more than a few silver tassels, they have the kind of figures that, in our own day, are usually acquired surgically. Many have their backs turned, their weight shifted seductively onto one leg, their backs arched to show off their cute bottoms, one arm drawn artfully back to reveal a bare breast, while they gaze over their shoulders, batting their eyelashes at the not so innocent temple-goer.

Just around the corner, in the next panel of reliefs, these visions of perfection are getting sweaty with some equally fit guys. Their sexual experience follows a familiar trajectory. First there is the attempt to expand the repertoire (some new positions), then a bit of kinky experimentation (threesomes) and then, before you know where you are, you are standing on your head, one woman astride you while two others press in on either side enjoying manual stimulation. I think we’ve all been there.

But if all this sounds like a stag night in Amsterdam, you are getting the wrong idea. The reliefs of Khajuraho are some of the finest sculpture in India. They are delicate, almost divine. The sex is beautifully portrayed, not carnal but erotic and elegant. But, like any graphic depiction of sex, it tends initially to overshadow everything else. And then it quickly becomes a trifle repetitive.

So what’s it all about? Why all the sex? Why do the temples of Khajuraho seem to have more in common with a suburban orgy than with your local parish church?

Sexual imagery is not unusual in Hindu and Buddhist iconography. You find it in temples of various periods throughout the subcontinent. Sex is a metaphor for the union of differences, for Creation; part of the quest for enlightenment. What nobody has been able to explain, though, is why the number and variety of sexual images is so much greater at Khajuraho than elsewhere. Like so much else here, that sexual profusion is a mystery.

It does, however, offer a glimpse of what life may have been like inside an Indian palace with its bulging harem – gorgeous women, wild sex, a tendency to experimentation. They also hint at the curious paradox that lies at the heart of the sexuality: that sense that there is no such thing as enough, and the sense that sex alone is never enough.