Victory City(27)
As for Pampa Kampana: she paid Vidyasagar a visit in the cave to which he had retreated, the cave in which his weaknesses had been revealed and inflicted repeatedly upon her body. She came without any retinue of guards or handmaidens, and wearing only the mendicant’s two strips of fabric, apparently turning herself once again into the ascetic young woman who had slept on the cave floor for so many years, and borne in silence everything he had done. She accepted his offer of a cup of water, and, after a few ritual compliments, outlined her plan.
As a central part of her program as culture minister, she told the great man, she proposed to build a spectacular new temple within the city walls, dedicated to a deity of Vidyasagar’s choice, whose staff of priests and devadasis, temple dancers, would be for the high priest to appoint. For her part, she told Vidyasagar with straight-faced solemnity and no hint of a suggestion that she knew that her words would horrify him, she would personally select the most gifted masons and stone carvers in Bisnaga to create a magnificent edifice and cover the rising temple’s walls, inside and outside, and also its monumental tower, its gopuram, with erotic bas-relief portraits featuring the beautiful devadasis and selected male counterparts in many positions of sexual ecstasy including, but not limited to, those spoken of in the Tantric tradition, or recommended in ancient times in the Kamasutra of the philosopher Vatsyayana of Pataliputra, of whom, she added, great Vidyasagar must surely be an admirer. These carvings, she proposed to the sage, should include sculptures of both the maithuna and mithuna types.
“As we are taught in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad,” she said, knowing perfectly well that to invoke not one but two sacred texts in the presence of the revered Vidyasagar was insolent behavior, to say the least, “erotic figures of the maithuna type are symbols of moksha, the transcendent condition which, when attained by human beings, releases them from the cycle of rebirth. ‘A man closely embraced by a woman knows nothing more of a without or a within,’?” she quoted the Upanishad. “?‘So also a man embraced by the spirit no longer separates the within and the without. His desire is satisfied, and his spirit. He has no desire anymore, nor pain.’ As for mithuna sculptures,” she went on, “these represent the reunion of the Essence. In the very beginning, the Upanishad tells us, the Essence, the Purusha, desired a second entity, and divided itself into two. Thus began man and wife, and so, when these are reunited, the Essence is once again whole and complete. And as is known it was by the union of the two parts that the whole universe itself came into being.”
Vidyasagar in his mid-fifties, with a white beard so long that he could wind it around his body, was no longer the skinny twenty-five-year-old with wildly curly hair who had defiled little Pampa in this cave. Life in the palace had thickened his waist and denuded his scalp. Other qualities, too, had fallen away from him, modesty, for example, and generosity toward the ideas and opinions of others. He heard Pampa Kampana out and then replied in his loftiest and most patronizing tones.
“I fear, little Gangadevi, that you must have been listening to people from the north. Your attempt to justify obscenity by calling upon the ancient wisdoms is ingenious, if tortuous, but, to say the least, misguided. It is well-known to us here in the south that those pornographic sculptures in such faraway places as Konarak are little more than attempts to portray the lives of the devadasis, who, in the north, are little better than prostitutes, and are willing to contort themselves into many filthy postures in return for a few coins. I will allow no such display upon the pristine sites of our Bisnaga.”
Pampa Kampana’s voice was like ice. “In the first place, great master,” she said, “I am not your little Gangadevi anymore. I have escaped that accursed life and am now Bisnaga’s beloved Twice-Queen. In the second place, while my lips have remained sealed concerning your behavior in this cave all those years ago, I am prepared to unseal them at any moment, should you try to stand in my way. In the third place, this has nothing to do with north or south, but a willingness to admire the sacred human form and its movement in both monogamous and polygamous unions. And in the fourth place, I have just this moment decided that it will not be necessary to build a new temple after all. I will have these carvings added to the temples that already exist, the New Temple as well as the Monkey Temple, so that you can look at them every day for the rest of your life, and ponder on the difference between willing and joyous lovemaking and forcing oneself brutally upon another, smaller, defenseless human being. And I have a further idea which it is not necessary to share with you.”
“Your power has grown greater than mine,” Vidyasagar told her. “For the moment, anyway. I can’t stop you. Do as you please. And as I can see from the continuation of your impossible youth, the goddess’s gift of longevity is real and impressive. Please know that I will pray to the gods to grant me an equally long life, so that you will have me standing against your decadent ways for as long as we both shall live.”
And so Pampa Kampana and Vidyasagar became, in a word, enemies.
This was Pampa Kampana’s “further idea”: to take erotic art away from the religious settings in which it had exclusively been seen up to that point, to set aside the need to justify it by calling upon the ancient texts, whether from the traditions of the Tantra or the Kamasutra or the Upanishads, whether Hindu or Buddhist or Jain, to separate it from high philosophical and mystical concepts, and to transform it into a celebration of everyday life. Bukka, a king who believed in the pleasure principle, gave her his full support, and in the months and years that followed carvings of devadasis and their male companions began to be seen on the walls of residential quarters, above the bars of the Cashew and other such hostelries, the exteriors and interiors of shopping establishments in the bazaar, and, in short, everywhere.