The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

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THE PERIOD OF THE HINDU DYNASTIES 285
and five separate string courses. These string
courses follow the various setbacks or recesses
of the plan so that a distinct impression of a
kind of wavy or curvilinear movement relieves
any feeling of straightness or rigidity in the mass.
Returning to the subject of the sculpture, we
must be aware of the fact that the Black Pagoda
has achieved a great deal of notoriety through
the frankly obscene nature of most of the carving
decorating the basement and also the
exterior of the porch. This carving might be
described as a literal illustration of the erotic
recipes of the Kama Sutra : it represents numerous
couples engaged in a great variety of
amorous antics, some of them of a definitely
perverse nature [220].
This endless round of
dalliance is a kind of sculptural apotheosis of
the relations between men and women. These
figures are representations of mithunas or auspicious
pairs, which in less extreme forms were
employed in Indian art from a very early
period. 11 Their embraces have been interpreted
as typifying the idea oimoksha or union with the
divine, the achievement of that primordial unity
broken at the time Purusa divided himself to
create the world. In a further metaphysical
sense the couples represent the mortals' wedding
with the divine or the idea of the gods'
cosmic procreation of the universe. Human
beings, following the devas and their saktis in
the sexual act, assume an identity with the loveplay
of the immortals. This is an expression of
love found in Indian literature from the L'panishads
to the romance ofSakuntala, 12 but it seems
that at Konaraka the function of these endlessly
repeated pairs in dalliance must have had something
to do with actual orgiastic rites conducted
in association with a special cult of the sun as
universal fructifying force. 13 It is unfortunate
that, for obvious reasons, none of these mithunas
can be reproduced in detail; each is a
separate masterpiece of relief composition in
which the feeling of movement, as well as the
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