Place · terracotta temple cluster · India
Maluti
Also known as Maluti, Maluti temples, Baj Basanta, Mauliksha
A village in the Santhal Parganas holding seventy-two surviving brick temples of an original hundred and eight, raised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by the Baj Basanta rajas, their walls faced with terracotta panels of the Ramayana, the Krishna cycle and hunting scenes. Nothing else in eastern India has this density of small temples.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.090, 87.750
Worth knowing
The rajas held the estate on a grant from the Bengal sultanate said to have been given to a man who caught the sultan's escaped hawk, and family branches competed by building, which is why there are a hundred and eight temples in one village. Most were derelict until a conservation programme began after 2010, and several have already gone.
Connections (1)
- AnalogueBishnupur
Maluti's seventy-two surviving brick temples and Bishnupur's terracotta group are the two great brick-and-terracotta temple clusters of the eastern plateau and delta, and both exist because there is no building stone: the money went into moulded clay panels of the Ramayana and the Krishna cycle instead of into carved stone. Bishnupur was a Malla capital; Maluti was a village of competing family branches.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Maluti temples”. Archaeological Survey of India and Global Heritage Fund conservation reports on Maluti; David McCutchion, Late Medieval Temples of Bengal (1972).
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