Journey
Central India — Pratihara, Chandela, Bundela and Gond
Four dynasties over eight centuries on the Vindhyan plateau and the Bundelkhand plains, each holding the same ground against whoever held Delhi. What they left is the densest concentration of Nagara temple building anywhere, the two most nearly impregnable hill forts in India, and a memory carried in ballads rather than chronicles.
Stops (16)
- Mihira Bhoja · Mihira Bhoja — the Pratihara century
The ruler under whom the Gurjara-Pratiharas held Kannauj and the doab against the Palas and the Rashtrakutas at once, in the three-cornered contest Arab geographers writing from Sindh treat as the central fact of Indian politics. They also held the north-west against Arab expansion for two centuries, which is the largest thing they did.
- Teli ka Mandir, Gwalior · Teli ka Mandir — the hybrid
A ninth-century Pratihara temple inside Gwalior fort, about thirty metres high, roofed with a barrel vault of southern Dravida type set on a northern plan — a hybrid with no clear parallel, and the tallest surviving building of the dynasty.
- Baroli temple complex · Baroli — eight temples in one wall
A Pratihara group on the Chambal, eight temples inside one walled enclosure, with a Nataraja panel that is among the finest ninth-century sculpture in India. Its Ghateshwar temple has an open porch on four sides, which is rare, and the group was almost unvisited until a Nataraja was stolen from it in 1998.
- Osian temples · Osian — the merchants' temples
Hindu and Jain temples of the eighth to eleventh centuries in the Thar, on the caravan route from Marwar toward Sindh, paid for by the merchant communities who used it — the Oswal Jains take their name from the town. It is the largest Pratihara-period temple group surviving in Rajasthan.
- Gwalior Fort · Gwalior Fort — the rock
A sandstone plateau three kilometres long held continuously from the fifth century, with a Gupta-period inscription carrying one of the world's earliest zeros, Tomara palaces, Jain colossi cut into the cliff, and the Teli ka Mandir inside the walls. Babur called it the pearl among the fortresses of Hind.
- Khajuraho · Khajuraho — the Chandela capital's temples
Twenty-five of an original eighty-five temples survive at what was the Chandela religious capital, built in about a hundred and fifty years around the turn of the millennium — Nagara towers clustered with subsidiary spires, and three bands of sculpture on the outer walls of which one, in the middle, is what everybody comes for.
- Khajuraho Jain group · Khajuraho's Jain group
The eastern group at Khajuraho is Jain, built in the same decades by the same guilds for the merchant community of the same town — the Parshvanatha temple is among the finest of them all. A dynasty endowing Shaiva, Vaishnava and Jain temples simultaneously in one place is the ordinary medieval arrangement, not an exception.
- Kālinjar Fort · Kālinjar — the fort that held
A Chandela fortress on an isolated Vindhyan spur, among the strongest in India: Mahmud of Ghazni failed at it, Humayun failed, and Sher Shah Suri was killed here in 1545 when a rocket burst against the wall he was besieging — which ended the Sur interregnum's momentum five years into it.
- Ajaygarh Fort · Ajaygarh — the last refuge
A Chandela fort on a flat-topped hill with one stepped approach, holding ruined temples, rock-cut tanks and a mass of loose sculpture, Jain and Shaiva together. It is where the dynasty retreated after Mahoba and Kalinjar were lost, and the hilltop is unguarded.
- Mahoba · Mahoba — the defeat that is sung
The Chandela political capital, with its great tank and the Sun temple, taken by Prithviraj Chauhan in 1182 — and the setting of the Alha cycle, which is fifty episodes about losing it. The town is small now and the ballad is the largest thing about it.
- Ālhā-Khaṇḍ · Ālhā-Khaṇḍ — the ballad memory
Bundelkhand remembers the Chandelas in fifty sung episodes rather than in inscriptions: the Banaphar brothers Alha and Udal, marshals of the last effective king, and their losing war with Prithviraj Chauhan. The temples are a state monument on a coach route and the ballad is village property, and the two almost never meet.
- Orchha · Orchha — the Bundela answer to Mughal scale
A capital on the Betwa built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the Jahangir Mahal raised for a single imperial visit and the Chaturbhuj temple built for an image that never arrived. Rajput form and Mughal detail merged rather than juxtaposed, by a state that could not afford to fight.
- Bīr Singh Deo · Bīr Singh Deo — architecture out of a murder
He backed Prince Salim against Akbar, killed Abu'l-Fazl on the road from the Deccan in 1602 at Salim's instruction, and was paid in revenue when Salim became Jahangir — which is what built the Jahangir Mahal at Orchha and the palace at Datia. The clearest case anywhere of a small state's architecture funded by one political killing.
- Datia Palace · Datia — seven storeys, never occupied
Bir Singh Deo's palace on a rock above the town: seven storeys, five of them above ground, built entirely without timber in brick and stone, with a central pavilion linked to the corners by flying bridges. It was finished and then never lived in, and it is the most intact building of its kind in India.
- Jhansi Fort · Jhansi — the fort that outlasted the dynasty
A Bundela fort of 1613 on a rock in the plain, which passed to the Marathas and then to Lakshmibai, whose state was annexed in 1854 when her adopted heir was refused recognition. Rose's siege took it in 1858 and the sack killed several thousand; she got out at night on a horse.
- Gond monuments, Ramnagar Mandla · Ramnagar, Mandla — the Gond kingdom
The fourth dynasty of the same region and the one nobody teaches: the Gond kingdom of Garha-Mandla, whose palace stands at Ramnagar inside a loop of the Narmada, and whose ruler Durgavati died in 1564 fighting Asaf Khan's Mughal force rather than be taken.