Place · leaning Shiva temple · India
Huma leaning temple
Also known as Huma, Leaning Temple of Huma, Bimaleswar
A seventeenth-century Shiva temple on the bank of the Mahanadi below Sambalpur whose whole structure leans, and whose subsidiary shrines lean at their own separate angles in their own separate directions — which is why the tilt is generally read as deliberate or as very early settlement rather than as later subsidence.
- Date
- c. 1670
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.335, 83.893
Worth knowing
The Kudo fish in the river below the temple are fed by pilgrims and are not caught by anyone, so a stretch of the Mahanadi has been an unfished sanctuary for three centuries by custom alone. The temple was built under Baliar Singh of the Sambalpur Chauhans, and nobody has been able to explain the lean.
Connections (1)
- Site adjacencySambalpur
The leaning temple at Huma and the Samaleswari shrine at Sambalpur were both built under the Chauhan rajas of western Odisha in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, twenty-five kilometres apart on the Mahanadi. One holds a goddess worshipped as an uncarved block of stone; the other leans, with its subsidiary shrines leaning at their own separate angles, and nobody can say why.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Huma, Odisha”. Archaeological Survey of India, Bhubaneswar circle monument records; Odisha State Gazetteer, Sambalpur district.
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