Day 100 - Indian erotica


November 8, 2018

I am happy to be returning to my project after what seems like a long interval, and happy, too, to be embarking on the South Asian galleries. These seem so familiar and accessible to me, whether because I visited them before my first trip to India or because there is something so human and sensual about the images.

Gallery 234 contains objects dating from the first two millennia  B.C.E.  I note several clay figures of goddesses with slim torsos and huge breasts and a wonderful clay figure of a girl riding a platform drawn by two Brahma bulls. I'm also intrigued by a large round dish whose interior is incised with the image of a bee fertilizing a lotus flower. Fecundity everywhere!

But how could I resist writing about this small square plaque, perhaps 2 inches on a side (the photo is probably slightly larger than the plaque itself), from the 1st century B.C.E. (the Shunga period)? It shows an elaborately coiffed man, clad in earrings, armband, anklets, and a necklace and nothing else, kneeling and thrusting his very inflated penis into the vulva of  a similarly adorned, or unadorned, woman who has obligingly lifted her right leg straight up into the air to rest on his left shoulder.  (Is this position even possible? It's new to me!) Her left arm encircles a smaller figure - a child perhaps? Several rosettes decorate the area of the plaque that surrounds the figures.

Who owned this little plaque, where was it kept, and for what purpose? Was it to inspire desire? To help ensure fertility? Or just to give visual pleasure and a bit of a frisson to its owner?


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