Journey
Nagara temple cities
Nāgara is the northern temple order: a curved shikhara rising in bands over a square sanctum, clustered into half-spires as it grows. Four regional schools at their limit — Chandela Khajurāho, Kalinga Bhubaneswar and Konārk, Solanki Modherā — with the stepwells their builders sank, where the same sculpture goes downward instead of up.
Stops (6)
- Khajuraho · Kandariya Mahādeva and the Chandela group
Twenty-five temples left of an original eighty-five, built by the Chandelas between about 950 and 1050 on a site with no city around it. Kandariya Mahādeva gathers eighty-four subsidiary spires around its shikhara so the whole reads as a mountain range. The erotic sculpture is perhaps a tenth of the carving and sits mostly on the junction walls.
- Lingaraja, Bhubaneswar · Lingarāja and the Ekāmra temple city
The Kalinga order at maturity: a deul rising fifty-five metres over the sanctum with a jagamohana, nāta-mandira and bhoga-mandapa added in front, so the plan reads as a processional sequence rather than a single room. Around it Bhubaneswar holds some five hundred surviving temples, the densest sequence of one style anywhere in India.
- Konark Sun Temple · The sun's chariot — Narasimhadeva I at Konārk
Built about 1250 by Narasimhadeva I as a chariot for Sūrya, with twenty-four carved wheels and seven horses hauling it out of the sand. The main deul was raised beyond what the Kalinga order could hold and fell; what stands is the jagamohana, filled with rubble by the Survey in 1903 to stop it going the same way.
- Modhera Sun Temple · The Solanki sun temple and its kunda
Built about 1026 under Bhīma I, with the sanctum aligned so that the equinox sun falls on the image. The plan is three parts — a stepped tank, an assembly hall and the shrine — laid on one axis, and the Sūryakunda in front is a hundred and eight small shrines cut into descending terraces of water.
- Rani ki Vav, Patan · Udayamatī's stepwell — the inverted temple
A queen's memorial to Bhīma I, sunk seven storeys into the ground at Patan about 1063 and silted over by the Saraswatī until excavation in the 1980s left the carving almost unweathered. More than five hundred principal sculptures line the descent, mostly Vishnu's avatars, so the pilgrim walks down through a temple rather than up to one.
- Chand Baori, Abhaneri · Chānd Baori and the Harshat Mātā temple
Thirteen storeys, roughly three and a half thousand steps in a double-helix geometry down to water, built from the ninth century beside the Harshat Mātā temple whose ruined nāgara sculpture shares its masons. The well is some twenty degrees cooler at the bottom, and the arcaded upper gallery was added under the Mughals.