Place · submerged temple group · India
Telkupi
Also known as Telkupi, Telkupi temples, Panchet, Shikhar kingdom
A group of some twenty temples of the ninth to twelfth centuries on the Damodar at Telkupi, in what was the Shikhar kingdom, almost all of them drowned by the Panchet reservoir in 1959. Photographs and plans made just before the flooding are now most of the record of a whole regional temple style.
- Date
- 850–1959
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.630, 86.750
Worth knowing
The Archaeological Survey documented them under salvage conditions and could move almost nothing; a few spires appear above the water when the reservoir is low. It is the clearest single instance in India of a river-engineering project taking an entire architectural group, and it happened two years after Hirakud took the temples of the upper Mahanadi.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueHirakud Dam
Hirakud on the Mahanadi drowned some two hundred and fifty villages and the temples of the upper valley in 1957; Panchet on the Damodar drowned the twenty temples of Telkupi two years later. Two of independent India's first river projects each took an architectural group, and in both cases the record is a salvage survey made just before the water rose.
- River flowDamodar
Telkupi's temples stood on the Damodar and were drowned by the Panchet reservoir in 1959, part of the same Damodar Valley Corporation scheme that was built to end the river's floods. The Sorrow of Bengal was engineered out of existence and took a ninth to twelfth-century temple group with it, documented under salvage conditions and mostly unmoved.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Telkupi”. David McCutchion's photographic survey of Telkupi; Archaeological Survey of India salvage records for the Panchet reservoir, 1957–59.
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