Kantajew Temple
Interesting facts
- The founding date is encoded as a chronogram in a four-line Sanskrit inscription, written in old Bengali characters, set into the temple's plinth.
- Before the earthquake of 1897 toppled its nine spires, the temple rose to about 70 feet, some 20 feet taller than today.
- Alongside the epics, the plaques record flowers, animals, geometric patterns and scenes of everyday life and pastimes in 18th-century Bengal.
- The nearby Nayabad Mosque, linked by tradition to the temple's craftsmen, is dated to 1793, four decades after the temple was finished.
- On 27 April 2024 more than 20,000 people gathered at the temple to recite the Bhagavad Gita together.
- Beside the temple, Bangladesh's Department of Archaeology set up a museum displaying black-stone sculptures and other finds from across the subcontinent.
Why it is worth it
Every wall of Kantajew Temple is a picture book in fired clay. Some 15,000 terracotta plaques wrap the brick structure from plinth to upper storey, crowded with episodes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and other Hindu legends. It is regarded as the finest surviving work of terracotta art in Bangladesh, and the density of the carving rewards slow circuits around the building, panel by panel.
The temple stands in the village of Kantanagar, on the bank of the Dhepa River north of Dinajpur, and is dedicated to Krishna, worshipped here as Kanta, and his consort Rukmini. According to the dedicatory inscription on its northern base, construction was begun by Maharaja Pran Nath Roy of Dinajpur late in his life; he died in 1722, and his adopted son Raja Ramnath Roy completed the building in 1752. It was conceived as a navaratna, or nine-spired temple, rising in three diminishing storeys from a square plan on a stone base, with multi-cusped arches opening on all four sides so that the image inside can be seen from every direction: 21 arched doorways on the ground floor, 27 on the second and three on each face of the top tier. A photograph from 1871 still shows the spires, but all nine fell in the great earthquake of 1897. Repairs early in the 20th century under Maharaja Girijanath saved the body of the temple, though the spires were never rebuilt, and what survives stands roughly 50 feet high.
Local tradition holds that craftsmen were brought from far away, some say from Persia, and that the raja granted land in the nearby village of Nayabad to house them; the small Nayabad Mosque is said to have been built by the Muslim workers for their own prayers. Since the time of Ramnath Roy a month-long Rash Mela has been held in the temple grounds at the start of winter, drawing pilgrims from across Bangladesh and India. The temple's silhouette has become a national emblem of Bengali architecture: Bangladesh modelled its pavilion at the 2017 Kolkata Book Fair on it, and in 2025 it appeared on the 20-taka banknote.
Getting there
The temple is about 18 km north of Dinajpur, west of the Dinajpur–Tetulia highway. The nearest airport is Saidpur Airport (SPD), about 25 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Kantanagar Temple, commonly known as Kantaji Temple or Kantajew Temple at Kantanagar, is a Hindu temple in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. The temple is an 18th century religious edifice. The temple belongs to the Hindu Kanta or Krishna, and is most popular with the Rukmini-Krishna devotees in Bengal. This temple is dedicated to Krishna and his wife Rukmini. Built by Maharaja Pran Nath, its construction started in 1704 CE and ended in the reign of his son Raja Ramnath in 1752 CE. It is an example of terracotta architecture in Bangladesh and once had nine spires, but all were destroyed in an 1897 earthquake.
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