Adya Shakti
Giti Thadani

Six hundred kilometres and two weeks later, Betteke and I arrived in Khajuraho. We explored the area as best as we could. Temples everywhere, sculptures everywhere. Overwhelming. Unfamiliar. I knew the different revolutions in European art, the different epochs, the cultural nuances, but these forms of sculpture exploded the frontiers of my consciousness. How was I to contextualize them? What was I being initiated into?
After satiating ourselves with rows and rows of detailed sculpture, I found the path to the yogini temple. People looked at us, shrugged their shoulders and replied with a disgruntled wave of the hand: Kuch nahin hai. There is nothing. We persisted.
Across the fields, behind the main temple complex, stands a rectangular temple on a mound. It is open to the skies, with all the niches in its inner walls empty. The central space is free, and as the sun set on that first visit I intuitively grasped that the temple had been built on the West–East axis: a cosmic stage on which the sun could descend and the moon rise amidst a liminal carpet of stars.
The yogini temple is the oldest temple in Khajuraho. It is the temple that first ‘initiated’ me, inspiring me to return again and again.
Thirteen times have I now been to Khajuraho, and each time I must start my journey in this temple, listening to the symphony of the sunset light before I begin any other exploration. It was there at the beginning, the punar. It was the source of every temple subsequently built in Khajuraho.
Punar is a Sanskrit word that expresses a primal beginning. It also means a return to this beginning; the movement of return is likened to an eternal homecoming. Is this temple a home, its minimality a source to which I must return in order to carry on as an eternal wanderer, a paduka?
And what does its architecture configure? A rectangular space open on each end, the back opening miniscule and the front opening majuscule. The back portal is like the eye of the needle, but it is adjacent to the largest niche. Geometrically and mathematically, it seems to convey the confluence of the other niches. Philosophically, the passage between the portals appears to be a path to the free centre, to the primal formless energy around which emerges the sum of all the yoginis, the sum of the infinite potential.
Infinity is formless—beyond numbers, beyond boundaries —yet it is the possibility of all forms, the sum of different individuated details. Each detail is unique, yet part of an underlying cosmological unity. A unity that is not a homog-enized ‘one’ but a ‘zero’, infinitely intricate.
Is the form of the temple earlier than that of the sculptures? Were the sculptures a later addition, another kind of memory as the living traditions died? Did women inhabit the site as living yoginis, meditate in the niches, build these mounds and these temples? Archaeologists and historians are puzzled as to who built these sites; no kingly reference is available. To acknowledge authorship by women, by yoginis themselves, would be to acknowledge and collapse their own mental prisons and lakshman-rekhas.
Yet there is an abundance of information in sculpture, architecture and even inscription—enough to begin decoding these mysteries.

Giti Thadani is a photographer, film maker and writer. She is the author of Sakhiyani (1996) and Moebius Trip, which is a finalist in the 2007 Lambda Literary Awards, USA.

From: Moebius Trip
pp 61-62

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