Читать книгу The Rise of Wisdom Moon - Krishna mishra - Страница 45

introduction

She slithers hither:

slowed by the big burden of her booty,

and revealing by a little trick

of her flowing garland’s pose,

pressed by playful arms,

breasts marked with lovers’ scratches;

With glances as long as strings of blue lotuses

she drinks up your mind

while jingling her bangles

with the languid movements of her wrists. (2.162 [34])

To focus upon sex, however, is to miss the chief concerns of both the temples and the play. Just as the deity Vishnu, as honored by Intuition at the conclusion of act four, is clearly exempt from the fun and folly of the preceding acts, so too the great image of Vishnu as Vaikuntha, in Khajuraho’s Lakshmana Temple, a temple with which Krishna·mishra may well have been familiar, transcends the swirling activity, erotic and otherwise, depicted on the shrine’s outer walls.21 The imperial order is silent at its center, but nonetheless this imperturbable calm forms the basis for both the love and the war whereby the kingdom thrives. Taken together, Khajuraho’s temples and Krishna· mishra’s play are perhaps best regarded as diverse iterations of the Chandella royal religion, for which divinity and sovereignty, cosmos and realm, were never quite two. Our play’s Vaishnavism, therefore, unmistakeable though it may be, was not yet distinguished from kingly cult and must not be assimilated to the devotional movements that would soon emerge as predominant throughout much of the North Indian religious scene.22

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