Marble Rocks
Interesting facts
- Rudyard Kipling based the bee-filled marble gorge in his Jungle Book story "Red Dog" on Bhedaghat, where wild bee colonies still hang from the cliffs.
- The gorge is often listed with Taiwan's Taroko Gorge as one of the few river canyons in the world cut through marble.
- The Chausath Yogini temple's 81 shrines, instead of the usual 64, are read by scholars as a mark of royalty, implying a king founded it.
- The temple is credited to the Kalachuri king Yuvaraja II, whose capital Tripuri lay just across the Narmada about four miles away.
- Scholar David Gordon White suggests the yogini temple was probably the largest building project of the Kalachuri dynasty.
- Most yogini statues had their faces smashed long ago, but the horse-faced yogini Erudi survives in perfect condition.
- The temple is also called Golaki Math, the "circular lodge", and the town itself was once known as Bhairavaghat.
- The 1973 Hindi film Bobby used the marble rocks of Bhedaghat as the setting for its climactic scene.
Why it is worth it
At Bhedaghat, near Jabalpur, the Narmada River squeezes into a gorge of gleaming marble that runs for about eight kilometres. The cliffs are mostly white, a magnesium-rich marble, streaked with bands of blue and brown, and they rise straight from the green water so that the colours shift with the light. The stone is unusually soft, closer to soapstone in hardness, and local workshops carve it into small figures sold in local craft shops.
Local memory keeps the time when the gorge was much narrower: one part is still called Bandar Kudni, "the monkeys' leap", from the days when monkeys could jump from one side to the other. Rowing boats take visitors up between the walls, and full-moon nights are considered the finest time to be on the water. Kartik Purnima brings ritual bathing and boating, and Sharad Purnima is associated with healing. Close by, the river narrows and plunges about 30 metres at Dhuandhar Falls; the name joins the Hindi words for smoke and flow, after the cloud of spray the fall throws up. A cable car crosses the gorge near the falls.
On a hilltop overlooking the river stands the Chausath Yogini temple, built in the early 11th century under the Kalachuris of Tripuri. It is a circular enclosure some 125 to 130 feet across, the largest of India's circular yogini temples, and it holds 81 stone images of yoginis rather than the usual 64. In 1155 a Gauri-Shankar shrine was set up at its centre. The gorge has also served as a film location for decades, from Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1961) to Asoka (2001) and Mohenjo Daro (2016).
Jabalpur, the nearest large city, is one of the main cities of Madhya Pradesh, close to the Narmada in the centre of the country.
Getting there
Bhedaghat lies about 20 km from the centre of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh; the small town of Khamaria is about 13 km away. The nearest airport is Jabalpur Airport (JLR), about 27 km away. Jabalpur's main railway station connects the area with the rest of the Indian rail network.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Marble Rocks is an area along the Narmada River in central India near the city of Jabalpur; in Bhedaghat of Jabalpur District, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The river has carved the soft marble, creating a beautiful gorge of about 8 km (5.0 mi) in length. It is a popular Indian tourist destination. The local marble is mined and carved into various figures and transported all over India.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
23.13120, 79.79650per Wikidata