Place · earlier Bhati capital & Jain temples · India
Lodurva
Also known as Lodurva, Lodhruva, Lodarva, Bhati capital
The Bhati capital before Jaisalmer, on the dry bed of the Kak, sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni and again in the twelfth century, after which Rawal Jaisal moved the seat to the defensible ridge that became Jaisalmer. What remains is a Jain temple group rebuilt in the seventeenth century around a kalpavriksha of carved stone.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.988, 70.730
Worth knowing
The move from Lodurva to Jaisalmer is a clean case of a desert capital being abandoned for a better rock: one town on a river that dried and a caravan route that shifted, the other on a ridge that has been continuously inhabited for eight hundred years. The Moomal and Mahendra ballad of the Thar is set here.
Connections (2)
- Power passed toJaisalmer Fort
The Bhatis moved their capital from Lodurva to the Jaisalmer ridge in the twelfth century after Lodurva had been sacked twice and its river had dried. It is the cleanest desert example of a capital chosen for rock rather than water: Jaisalmer's fort has been continuously inhabited for eight hundred years, and Lodurva is a Jain temple group on a dry bed.
- Site adjacencyOsian temples
Lodurva and Osian are the two pre-Rajput-fort temple landscapes of the Marwar and Jaisalmer desert, both on the caravan road and both eighth to twelfth century. What they show is that the Thar had monumental architecture and Jain mercantile endowment three centuries before the great forts, and that both were built on transit revenue rather than on agriculture.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lodhruva”. Rajasthan District Gazetteer, Jaisalmer; James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han (1829–32), used with caution.
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