Place · Pratihara Shiva temple · India
Teli ka Mandir, Gwalior
The 9th-century Shiva temple on the Gwalior Fort plateau, built by the Pratihara king Mihira Bhoja (ruled 836-885 CE) — the oldest surviving structure on the fort. The temple's distinctive barrel-vaulted roof of Dravida type sits on a Nagara (northern) plan, a deliberate architectural hybrid that mixed southern vaulting with northern mandala-planning. The 25-metre vaulted shikhara is one of only three surviving Pratihara-period temples with such a roof. The sculpture programme on the exterior shows Shaiva, Vaishnava and goddess forms together — Rashtrakuta-period influence on Pratihara architecture. The temple's name 'Teli ka Mandir' (temple of the oil-presser) is a later folk etymology. ASI protection since the 1890s.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Patron dynasty
- Chandela
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.228, 78.170
Connections (3)
- Site adjacencyGwalior Fort
The Teli ka Mandir stands inside Gwalior fort — a ninth-century Pratihara temple roofed with a barrel vault of southern Dravida type on a northern plan, about thirty metres high, which is an odd hybrid with no clear parallel. The fort around it carries layers from the fifth century onward: Tomara palaces, Jain colossi cut into the cliff face, and a Gupta-period inscription with one of the earliest zeros.
- Teaching lineageBaroli temple complex
Baroli on the Chambal and the Teli ka Mandir at Gwalior are two Pratihara groups two hundred kilometres apart, and together they show the range of what that dynasty's masons were doing in the ninth century — Baroli's eight temples in one walled enclosure with a fine Nataraja, and Gwalior's odd thirty-metre hybrid of a southern barrel vault on a northern plan. The Pratiharas held the Gangetic doab against the Arabs and the Rashtrakutas for two centuries and are remembered mainly for these.
- Site withinGwalior
Teli ka Mandir, Gwalior sits inside Gwalior and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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