India, Feb. 17 -- I had been there twice before; once in the unforgiving heat of May and another time in November, when Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh felt almost too quiet. I came away each time impressed, intrigued, but strangely unmoved. The temples were extraordinary, of course, and they deserved every superlative. But Khajuraho remained, in my mind, a place you visited, admired, and left.

It took an offhand conversation in Varanasi with a fellow traveller to unsettle that certainty. "You've been to Khajuraho and never seen the dance festival?" he asked, genuinely surprised.

That question sent me back for a third visit, this time in February, timed deliberately around the Khajuraho Dance Festival. What I found wasn't just a cultural ev...