Place · abandoned temple group · India
Kiradu temples
Also known as Kiradu, Kiradu temples, Someshwara Kiradu, Kiratkup
Five surviving temples of an original larger group in the desert west of Barmer, built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries under the Parmars of Kiradu, with carving as fine as anything in Gujarat or Rajasthan and a Someshwara temple that is the best of them. The town around them is gone entirely.
- Date
- 1020–1180
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.720, 71.220
Worth knowing
They stand alone in scrub with no settlement, which is why a folk story explains the emptiness by a curse, and why the site is locally avoided after dark. The real reason is the raids of the thirteenth century and a shifting water table: the desert's temple architecture is as good as the plains' and has almost no audience.
Connections (1)
- AnalogueRani ki Vav, Patan
Kiradu's five temples stand alone in the Barmer scrub with no settlement at all, and Rani ki Vav at Patan was silted over and dug out in the 1980s. Both are eleventh and twelfth-century work of the first quality that lost its audience: one abandoned by a shifting water table and thirteenth-century raids, the other buried by the Saraswati. Neither is on anybody's route.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kiradu temples”. Archaeological Survey of India, Jodhpur circle records; Rajasthan District Gazetteer, Barmer.
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