Place · marble gorge & waterfall · India
Bhedaghat
/bʱeːɽaːɡʱaːʈ/
Also known as Bheraghat, Bhedaghat Marble Rocks
Below Jabalpur the Narmada cuts a narrow gorge through soft marble cliffs that rise on both banks and shift colour with the light. Above the gorge the river falls at Dhuandhar, the "smoke cascade," and a hill above it carries a circular sixty-four yogini temple, one of the few such shrines to survive.
- Periods
- Classical and Puranic Age, Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Early Modern Age, British Colonial Age, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Water & infrastructure
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.130, 79.800
Worth knowing
The yogini temple here is usually dated to the Kalachuri period, around the tenth century.
Connections (3)
- Parikrama legAmarkantaka
The Narmada rises at Amarkantak in the Maikal hills and runs west to cut the marble gorge at Bhedaghat below Jabalpur, where the cliffs rise on both banks and change colour with the light. Both are stages of the parikrama, the circumambulation of the entire river that takes about three years on foot. Above the Bhedaghat gorge stands the Chausath Yogini temple, so the river's most dramatic reach also carries one of its strangest shrines.
- Site adjacencyChausath Yogini, Bhedaghat
Above the marble gorge at Bhedaghat stands a tenth-century Chausath Yogini temple — a circular open-air colonnade of cells, built by the Kalachuris, holding carved images of the yoginis of a Tantric circle. There are only a handful of such temples anywhere, all of them circular, all hypaethral, and this one is set directly above one of the most dramatic river landscapes in central India.
- Site withinChausath Yogini, Bhedaghat
The Chausath Yogini circular temple sits within the Bhedaghat gorge of the Narmada in Jabalpur district, Madhya Pradesh, perched on a sandstone bluff directly above the marble canyon. The 10-century circular shrine with 64 yogini niches around the inner wall is one of only four surviving major Chausath Yogini temples in India and architecturally one of the finest Kalachuri works.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bhedaghat”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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