Khajuraho Group of Monuments
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The temples were built without mortar: sandstone blocks lock together with mortise-and-tenon joints and stay in place by gravity, some beams weighing up to 20 tons.
- The fine local sandstone let carvers render details as small as strands of hair, manicured nails and individual pieces of jewellery.
- Many inscriptions on the temple walls are poems with double meanings, a play that the structure of Sanskrit makes possible.
- Most of the temples are laid out on an eight-by-eight grid of 64 squares, with the main deity placed in the central squares beneath the spire.
- According to local legend the temple town once had 64 bodies of water; archaeologists have so far identified 56 of them.
- In 1022 the Persian scholar al-Biruni, travelling with Mahmud of Ghazni's army, recorded Khajuraho as the capital of the Chandela kingdom.
- Long after the site was overgrown, Alexander Cunningham reported that yogis still used the temples quietly and thousands of pilgrims came for the festival of Shivaratri.
- The earliest-dated temple of the group, the Chausath Yogini of about 885 CE, is dedicated to a circle of 64 yoginis, female divine attendants of the goddess.
- Some 19th-century repairs used brick and mortar, which have weathered and darkened much faster than the original stone around them.
- A 10th-century temple in Rajasthan, Bhand Deva, was built in the same style and is often nicknamed Little Khajuraho.
Why it is worth it
The temples of Khajuraho are the surviving core of a religious city built by the Chandela dynasty in what is now Madhya Pradesh, in the heart of India. Most were raised between about 885 and 1000 CE, and inscriptions suggest the greater part of what stands today was complete by around 1030. By the 12th century there were some 85 temples spread over 20 square kilometres; about 25 survive across 6. Hindu shrines to Shiva and Vishnu stand alongside Digambara Jain temples, built in the same period and in the same style, and UNESCO listed the group in 1986 for the quality of its architecture and the variety of its temple forms.
The temples are best known for their erotic sculpture, but that reputation distorts what a visitor actually sees. Sexual scenes make up less than a tenth of the carving, and most are placed so discreetly that a guide has to point them out. The overwhelming impression is of walls alive with figures: gods and goddesses, musicians, warriors and scenes of everyday life, set in rows that climb towards the spires. All the temples but one, the Chaturbhuja, face the sunrise, and their plans follow the square-and-circle geometry of the Hindu mandala.
The largest and most visited temple, Kandariya Mahadeva, dedicated to Shiva, has a spire rising about 35 m, and its walls carry more than 870 statues, most of them about half life-size. The Lakshmana temple, built under King Yashovarman, is the focus of the Western group. The Eastern group holds the Jain temples of Parshvanatha, Adinatha and Shantinatha, and the ruined Ghantai temple, named for the bells carved on its pillars. The Matangeshvara temple, with a lingam 2.5 m tall, is the one still in regular worship.
Khajuraho declined after the Delhi Sultanate seized the Chandela kingdom in the 13th century; the traveller Ibn Battuta, in the 1330s, found mutilated idols and long-haired yogis living among the temples. Forest crept over the site, and it reached a wider audience only in the 1830s, when local people led the British surveyor T. S. Burt to the ruins. The name comes from the Sanskrit for date palm. Each February the Khajuraho Dance Festival stages classical Indian dance with the Chitragupta or Vishvanatha temples as a backdrop.
Getting there
The monuments sit beside the small town of Khajuraho, about 46 km from Chhatarpur and some 620 km southeast of New Delhi. Khajuraho Airport (HJR) is about 4 km away and has had flights to Delhi and other cities; check current schedules. Khajuraho railway station is about 6 km from the entrance to the monuments.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments are a group of Hindu and Digambara Jain temples in Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh, India. They are about 46 km from Chhatarpur city, the district headquarters, 283 km from Gwalior, 175 kilometres (109 mi) southeast of Jhansi, 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) from Khajwa and 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) from Rajnagar. The temples are famous for their Nagara-style architectural symbolism and a few erotic sculptures.
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