Yogini Rati: The huntress and the rat

Photo: Hirapur Yogini Temple by Dr Richard Barz

Contemplating on all dimensions of Kaama or pleasure is a central space in contemplation practices. Our pleasure seeking drive is the most powerful emotion in us. It is more powerful than our intellect. Rather than reject, control and brutalise our beings through denial, aesthetics invites us to inquire into Kaama so we perceive its full trajectory and movement.

Rati is the lust aspect of Kaama. It is the deepest kernel of our pleasure drive and denotes that aspect of our pleasure-seeking nature that is unfiltered by social and domestic frameworks. Rati represents a voracious wanting that does not even pretend to the altruism of paradigms such as parenting (motherly or fatherly love) and other similarly mediated forms of our desire. Rati asks us to face the root of the desire nature in us, away from the veneer of gentility we endow upon that nature through our social and cultural narratives.

In this startling sculpture of the Yogini, Rati stands on a rat. This contemplation space collides the alluring, powerful magnetism of the huntress of lust with the voracious, banality of the rat. In truth, whatever stories we tell ourselves about our Kaama-drenched actions, they are no different to the tenacious drive of a rat to find food by burrowing deep into the bowels of the earth if necessary.

The seductive and overwhelming beauty of Rati and the humble, persistence of the rat—the merging of the two domains provides the truth of the heart of the Kaama experience. The movement of Rati and the moushika (the rat) when held in the same moment opens up the surprising, startling truth about the true nature of the essence of Kaama.

No matter how we paint our desires, at the core of them is the gnawing, every hungry rat. It is only by inquiring into desire, moving it aesthetically, that we can “know” this truth as an emotional reality. So long as it remains an intellectual concept or a thought, we do not perceive the reality.