The prime minister, Narendra Modi, recently said that the Sun temple in Konark had sculptures of fashionable girls who wore skirts and carried purses. Maybe Modi had been turning the pages of THE SUN TEMPLE OF KONARK (Niyogi, Rs 1,495) by Anil Dey. Of the several startling remarks that Dey makes about Konark, one is the description of a sculpture that is "unimaginably modern" for the 13th century, that of a woman carrying a vanity bag. The poor quality of the book's production makes it impossible to determine what it is that the woman in the accompanying photograph is actually carrying in her hands.
Dey, who says he has been fascinated with Konark since his youth, claims that the purpose of the book is to "crack legends with a scientific tool and arrive at the core". He goes about this task by comparing the works of other scholars who have studied Konark and pointing out how their findings are similar or contradictory. Rarely do any of these comparisons enable Dey to make an argument of his own. It is not just the grammatical slip-ups or spelling errors that make the text difficult to follow. Dey also keeps going back and forth between academic opinions and scriptures and between the historical and the mythological. A slimmer volume, closer editing and better photographs might have salvaged Dey's enterprise.
Dey devotes considerable energy to the study of erotic sculptures - "[t]he word 'erotic' means sexual love" Dey helpfully informs us - which are everywhere in Konark. If this seems "excessive", it may be because most carvings of gods, their consorts and other "godly bodies" like the river Ganga have been plundered, leaving only the erotic sculptures behind. Dey is of the opinion that "[t]he entirety of the presentation is about the eternal journey of man and woman in their body chariot". His captions for some of the carvings are quite original. There is not only "Warming genitals on oven" and "Sex - hanging from neck", but also "Happy", "Robust" and "Busy" sex, to list just a few classifications.
Among the remaining sculptures of gods still adorning Konark are the parshwa devatas, representing the Sun god. The boot-like shoes covering the feet of the god [Above] are an aberration in terms of temple-art in Odisha. Historians believe that the feature is typical to the Sun god, who is of Iranian-Tunisian origin.
Above is a picture of one of the 24 wheels that are synonymous with the Sun temple. The wheels are nine inches and nine centimetres in diameter, with a rim that its nine inches wide. The spokes of the wheel are three inches and three centimetres in length. Each wheel has nine circles - one in the centre and eight more on the spokes - with intricate carvings. Below is a row of elephants - a favourite of the sculptors of Konark - on the upana, the foot-thick strip on which the wheels seem to be rolling.
