Journey
Eastern Ganga & Kalinga
Odisha built its own temple order and kept it: a curved rekha tower, a pyramidal porch, a vocabulary of mouldings, and a system of masons' guilds that worked it out over six centuries in one city and then applied it at imperial scale twice — at Puri and at Konark.
Stops (9)
- Ekāmra Kshetra, Bhubaneswar · Ekāmra Kshetra — the laboratory
Around seven hundred temples once stood in Bhubaneswar, spanning the third century BCE to the fifteenth, and about five hundred survive in some form — a single city in which one architectural order was worked out over more than a thousand years, from small square shrines to the Lingaraja.
- Mukteśvara Temple, Bhubaneswar · Mukteśvara — the hinge
A small tenth-century temple called the gem of Odishan architecture, and the point at which the style turns: the first with a fully developed pidha porch and a free-standing arched gateway in front of it, carved with a delicacy nothing earlier in Kalinga attempts. Everything the Lingaraja does is tried here first.
- Rājarāṇī Temple, Bhubaneswar · Rājarāṇī — the tower with no deity
An eleventh-century temple of dull red sandstone with a clustered shikhara of miniature turrets unlike anything else in Odisha and an empty sanctum, so it is maintained as a monument rather than a shrine. Its outer wall carries the most reproduced female figures in Odishan sculpture.
- Lingaraja, Bhubaneswar · Lingarāja — the order completed
The mature Kalinga temple, about 1100: a fifty-five-metre rekha tower with three subsidiary halls in line before it, in a walled compound holding a hundred and fifty smaller shrines. It is still in worship and closed to non-Hindus, which is why most people see it from a viewing platform outside.
- The Kaliṅga śilpa tradition · The śilpa manuals and the masons
Odisha wrote its architecture down in vernacular manuals — the Bhubana Pradipa, the Silpa Prakasa — naming three building types and every moulding in sequence, and the maharana families of temple masons still work to them. New temples are built by the tradition and the restorations are done by masons trained in it.
- Anantavarman Choḍaganga · Anantavarman Choḍaganga — the state temple
He took Kalinga, held it from the Ganges to the Godavari for seventy years, and began the Jagannatha temple about 1135 — converting a local cult into an imperial institution. The establishment outlived his state by six centuries and is still Puri's largest landholder and employer.
- Jagannātha Temple, Puri · Purī — the temple as the state
Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra in wood rather than stone, replaced every twelve to nineteen years in a rite performed by hereditary carpenter families, and pulled through the streets each June on three chariots built new every year. The Gajapati king's role is to sweep the chariot floor, which is the whole theory of the kingdom in one gesture.
- Narasiṃhadeva I · Narasiṃhadeva I — and the cost of Konark
He stopped the Bengal sultanate's advance into Odisha in the 1240s and then built the sun temple, on a scale that strained the dynasty's finances and exceeded what its masons could hold up. The tower came down; the porch was filled with sand in 1903 to stop it following.
- Konark Sun Temple · Konārk — the chariot
A temple built as the sun god's chariot: twelve pairs of carved stone wheels along the plinth, seven horses at the front, and a porch whose vault was the largest the tradition ever attempted. The main tower has gone and the sculpture is the finest in eastern India — which is the usual verdict on a building that failed.