Place · Hindu Shahi temple groups · Pakistan
Kāfir Kot & Bilot
Also known as Kāfir Kot & Bilot — the Indus Shahi temples
Two walled temple groups on the right bank of the Indus in Dera Ismāʿīl Khān district, built by the Hindu Shahis between the seventh and tenth centuries and the largest concentration of their architecture outside the Salt Range. Kāfir Kot sits inside a fortification circuit on a hill above the river with several temples surviving to their shikharas; Bilot, downstream, keeps carved doorframes and pilasters of a quality that has been compared to Kashmir's. Both are on Pakistan's tentative world heritage list.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.500, 71.333 (approximate)
Worth knowing
The name simply means the infidels' fort, which is what the buildings had become to everyone living around them by the time anyone wrote the name down — the dynasty that built them left no local memory at all.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asMalot Temple
Kāfir Kot and Bilot on the Indus, and Malot and Amb on the Salt Range, are the two concentrations of Hindu Shahi temple architecture that survive, and they mark the two arms of the dynasty's territory after it lost Kabul. The idiom is the same in both — trefoil arches in gabled niches, fluted pilasters, a Kashmiri vocabulary executed in local stone — and both sit inside fortification walls, because these were frontier garrisons as much as shrines. The Indus group is the larger and the less visited.
- Imperial administration ofHund / Udabhāndapura
Hund was the Shahi capital on the Indus after Kabul was lost; Kāfir Kot and Bilot are Shahi temple groups three hundred kilometres downstream on the same river's right bank. Together they show the shape of the state: a court at the ford where the river could be crossed, and fortified temple complexes strung down the bank below it. Mahmūd of Ghazni took Hund in 1001 and the Salt Range forts by 1014, and the Indus temples were left to be renamed by the people who stayed.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kafir Kot” and “Bilot Sharif”. Pakistan UNESCO tentative list submission for the Hindu Shahi temples (2016); Abdur Rahman, The Last Two Dynasties of the Śāhis (1979).
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