The 64 Yoginis constitute one of the most conceptually sophisticated, radical, and under-studied knowledge systems in Indian cultural history. Emerging between the 9th and 12th centuries, the Yogini temples — circular, open-air, decentralised structures — challenged inherited hierarchies of power, gender, divinity, and ritual practice. These were not sanctums of worship in the classical sense; they were epistemic laboratories, spaces where intuition, embodiment, feminine cosmology, and non-linear time were explored without orthodox mediation.
In the contemporary moment, marked by renewed debates on gender, heritage, and identity, the Yoginis return not as relics, but as a feminist methodology. Ekaa – The One, created by artist-filmmaker Dr. Beena Unnikrishnan, is an ambitious contemporary re-engagement with this tradition in recent memory. Over a decade, Dr. Beena travelled across dispersed Yogini shrines — Hirapur, Bhedaghat, Khajuraho and beyond — not simply as a researcher, but as a practitioner of embodied attention: listening, observing, pausing, surrendering. Her 64 contemporary paintings are not iconographic reproductions; they are translations that bring mythic energies into contemporary feminist discourse. Each painting is an interface between archive and intuition, between the metaphysical and the material, between ancient memory and contemporary identity. The project frames the Yoginis not as spiritual artefacts, but as intellectual, political, and aesthetic frameworks. This has led to the development of an unprecedented 81-day, 16-state national travelling exhibition — the first of its kind — designed to democratise feminine heritage and expand its accessibility beyond the institutional sphere.
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