Place · medieval capital & temple site · India
Barsur
The medieval capital of the Nagvanshi Chhindaka Naga dynasty at Barsur in Dantewada district, Chhattisgarh, 400 kilometres from Raipur — the 11-12th century capital of the Nagvanshi Nagas who ruled the Bastar region from c.760 to 1324 CE. The complex preserves four major 11-12th century temples: the Mama-Bhanja Mandir (named for an uncle and nephew ritual pair), the Chandraditya Mandir (dedicated to Shiva as moon-sun), the Battisa Mandir (the 'Thirty-Two Pillar' temple) and the Bhairav Mandir. The temples' Nagvanshi style blends Kalachuri-Nagara influence with distinctive Bastar regional carving. The site also preserves two giant Ganesha monoliths (3 metres high each) at the Bavan Temple ruins. The Bastar princely state continued the Nagvanshi line through the 20th century under the Kakatiya-descended Bhanj dynasty. The forests around Barsur have been a Maoist insurgency zone.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Central Indian and Bastar traditions
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.870, 81.350
Connections (3)
- AnalogueBhoramdeo
Barsur in the Bastar forest and Bhoramdeo in the Maikal hills are the two places that show monumental Nagara temple building well inside the forested plateau, under the Chhindaka Nagas and the Nagvanshis respectively. Both are usually described as outliers, which assumes the forest was a margin; the temples are the evidence that it had its own courts and its own masons.
- Craft tradition ofḌhokrā
Bastar's Ghadwa smiths cast by the coiled-wax method, and the plateau also carries wrought iron, wood carving and terracotta horses. Barsur's eleventh-century stone sculpture and the living metal work are separated by nine hundred years and by nothing else: the same plateau, and in several cases the same communities attached to the same court.
- Site adjacencyKotumsar caves
The Kotumsar cave and the Barsur temples are both in Bastar, forty kilometres apart, and together they are the two things the plateau is usually denied: a described cave fauna with a blind fish found nowhere else, and eleventh-century monumental stone temples built by the Chhindaka Nagas. Neither fits a reading of the forest as a periphery waiting to be filled in.
On these journeys
Sources
Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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