Thread by @DalrympleWill

"An hour’s drive from Bedsa, up another precipitous pilgrim’s path, lies the monastery of Karle, which boasts perhaps the most exquisitely wrought hall to survive from ancient India."

ft.com/content/e0ce28…

"Here the façade of the monastery is filled with lines of stone elephants and, facing them, paired statues of scantily-clad mithuna couples, loving fertility figures, several of them dancing merrily together."

"Despite the sanctity of the site, specifically built to house celibate monks, we are here at times nearer the world of Bollywood than of the otherworldly Buddha that westerners – or the more austere Thai or Chinese Buddhists – might expect to find decorating such a sanctuary."

"As the great Indian art historian Vidya Dehejia puts it: “The idea that such sensual images might generate irreverent thoughts did not seem to arise; rather the associations appear to have been with growth, prosperity and auspiciousness.”

"In the eyes of the monks who lived here, this was completely appropriate decoration, notwithstanding the languor of the couples, naked but for their jewels, girdles, and in the case of one woman, an elaborate proto-monokini..."

"Karle could provide more than enough material for some future PhD on the changing fashions in ancient Indian lingerie."

"The chaitya hall still miraculously preserves its ancient wooden roof beams, like the wrecked keel of a prehistoric ark."

"These amazing masterworks of early Buddhist art and architecture are the prototypes of the forms that would later spread over the Himalayas to Afghanistan, China and Japan, or by sea to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and the rest of southeast Asia."

"The roots of all this lie scattered around these stark Maharashtrian hills, alone among the precipices and dragon’s back peaks."