Osho speaks on Khajuraho and development of women
I was telling you about Khajuraho. If you see those women, they are Hindu women, and not of today, but of those days when those women were carved. Women must have modeled, otherwise you cannot have all that proportion. You will not find such round breasts anywhere in the world as you will find in the Khajuraho statues. But Indian women used to have that kind of breast. Unless a woman had that kind of breast, full grown, fully rounded, she was not beautiful. And she was missing something, she could not be a true mother. Of course, little kids would have been in trouble with those breasts, that I can understand.
When I was visiting – and I was visiting Khajuraho again and again because Khajuraho is one of the tremendous phenomena, those thirty temples – I asked the guide, who finally became a sannyasin – he is now a sannyasin, the guide who was in Khajuraho – I asked him, “If the breast is so round, then it will be very difficult for the child to drink milk out of it. His nose will go into the breast. He will choke. Because the mouth is drinking, the nose will be closed, he will die.”
He said, “You are a strange man. I have been here for thirty years, I have shown thousands of people these temples, but nobody bothered about it. Not even I myself have thought…. It is true.”
I said, “You can try.”
He said, “There is no need to try, it is absolutely true.” With such a round breast, the nose is bound to be squashed and the child cannot breathe. It would have been really difficult for the kids. But I have looked in the ancient most scriptures of India: the breast is depicted by Kalidas, Bhavabhuti, by all the great poets, in the same way.
In the West the breast is disappearing. In the East also it is no longer the same. Something has gone wrong somewhere. Something has changed. In the West, the woman is trying to be equal to man in every possible way. Her psychology is different now: she wants to wear the same clothes as man. Naturally her body is changing its shape. With the clothes, with the psychology, with her desire, her body is changing: her breasts and her bottom are both disappearing. She is becoming a straight pillar, with no ups, no downs. That is ugly, but unless she stops the idea of becoming like man…. The body follows the mind. It slowly slowly fits to the idea of the mind.
I have been a guest in tribes, very ancient tribes, where the woman is stronger than the man. For the first time when you see the fact, you cannot believe it. All over the world the man is taller, stronger, muscular; the woman is smaller, not muscular. But in these tribes in central India, the woman is taller. The woman has muscles. The woman does all kinds of work, the man takes care of the children. Naturally he has shrunk, he is no longer the same man because he is not using his muscles. He has become the wife, the wife has become the husband.
Once your psychology changes… and why did it happen in central India? – because the man found it easier. You can marry as many women as you want, so man started marrying many women. And he started putting them to use, to work: “Go to the farm, go to the orchard, go to the river, go to the well to bring water.” What should all these women do, sitting in the house? He started resting and the women started working. And of course when women are working, they will leave the children with the husband, saying “Just watch over the children, take care of them.”
Slowly slowly the woman became taller, stronger. Now the situation is, the man cannot beat the woman. In central India the woman beats the man, and that is accepted, just as in other parts of India, if a man hits his wife it is accepted. He need not even give an apology – it is his right. The same is true in central India; the wife can beat the husband, it is her right. If he has not been taking care of the children well, he is going to be punished.
All over the world the woman has remained small because man has been imposing the psychology: “I am bigger, stronger. I am your caretaker, your safety, your security.” And he is making the woman weaker, because the weaker she is, the more she will be dependent on him. So don’t educate her, don’t let her work, so financially she is weak, educationally she is weak. She has to depend on you. Where can she go? What can she do? How can she earn her livelihood? It is impossible.
When Bhavabhuti, Kalidas, and other poets, and these unknown sculptors, were painting the women…. It was not imaginary because it is not only in one place. All over India, in any temple, you will find the same statue, the same kind of statue, the same figure. It must have been common. But it started disappearing as the Mohammedans entered India.
As the Mohammedans entered India, they brought women who used a veil called a bourka, a black veil covering all the body. They rarely see the sunlight; many may not ever have seen the sun in their life. They rarely see other human beings, other than their husband, their children. Their bodies are pale – are bound to be – weak, fragile. They don’t have round, big breasts; their bodies cannot support that kind of breast. When Mohammedan women came to India… and Mohammedans are very interested in other people’s women because they can marry four women. In their own society they cannot find four, because the proportion always remains the same, naturally – as many boys as girls are born.
You will be surprised – nature has a way of its own, its own arithmetic. One hundred girls are born, then one hundred and ten boys are born, because by the time they become mature ten boys will have died. Boys are weaker: their resistance to diseases, to sickness, is less than the woman’s. So one hundred girls and one hundred and ten boys – that is the proportion nature brings. Ten more, because ten are going to be finished before they become marriageable. By the time they are sixteen they will be of equal numbers.
So it seems to be a natural arrangement: one man, one woman – that should be the way. How can you get three other women, from where? So they were grabbing anybody’s women. With the Mohammedans, purdah, ghoonghat, entered India. The Indian woman also started hiding herself in her sari, with her sari pulled down over the head so nobody could see her face, and she started using clothes which don’t show her breasts. Otherwise she was joyous about her body. With Mohammedans coming to India she became afraid of her body. She became, deep down in her psychology, shrunken. To be a woman became a sin, a danger. It is from the Mohammedan period in India that the woman lost her old beauty, her old proportions. She is no longer the Khajuraho woman.
Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness, Ch 22, Q 1