Tradition · architectural craft tradition
Bengal terracotta temple facing
Bengal's answer to having no stone: brick temples faced entirely in moulded and carved terracotta plaques, tens of thousands to a building, showing Ramayana and Krishna scenes alongside hunts, ships, Portuguese soldiers, horses and hookahs — a village record of what people were looking at.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.076, 87.320
Worth knowing
The curved chala roof of these temples copies the thatched bamboo hut, which is the only Indian temple form derived from vernacular housing rather than from a canonical prototype — and it was then borrowed back by the sultanate's mosque builders, so the do-chala and char-chala roof appears on both.
Connections (1)
- Craft tradition ofBanaras brocade
Bengal had no stone and no marble, so its temple ornament is moulded clay and its luxury is woven: terracotta plaque facing on the temples and Dhaka muslin and Banaras-style brocade on the looms, both traded through the same river ports. The terracotta panels themselves are one of the few visual records of what Bengali textiles, boats, hookahs and European soldiers actually looked like in the seventeenth century, because nobody was painting them.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hindu temple architecture”. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760 (1993); Perween Hasan, Sultans and Mosques (2007).
Open Bengal terracotta temple facing in the repository →