Khajuraho Temples: Chandela Art and Architecture

The Khajuraho temples are a group of Hindu and Jain temples in Madhya Pradesh, central India, built mainly between about 950 and 1050 by the Chandela dynasty. Famous for their soaring towers and dense sculpture, including a small number of celebrated erotic scenes, they are among the finest examples of medieval north Indian architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

The Chandela dynasty

The Chandelas rose in the ninth century in Bundelkhand, a hilly region south of the Ganges plain. Their founder is traditionally named as Nannuka, and for several generations they were subordinate rulers under the powerful Gurjara-Pratihara kings of Kannauj.

As Pratihara power weakened in the tenth century, the Chandelas grew more ambitious. Yashovarman (reigned c. 925–950) won important fortresses, including Kalinjar, and his son Dhanga (c. 950–1002) ruled as a fully independent king. Under Vidyadhara (c. 1003–1035) the dynasty was among the strongest in northern India and resisted the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni.

Khajuraho, whose name is usually linked to the khajur or date palm, served as a religious and royal centre. The scholar Al-Biruni, writing around 1030, names “Kajuraha” as the capital of the Chandela country of Jajahuti. Later the dynasty relied more on its fortresses at Kalinjar and Mahoba.

Building the temples

Building at Khajuraho spans roughly two centuries. The oldest surviving shrine, the Chausath Yogini temple, is made of rough granite and dates to the late ninth or early tenth century. The great sandstone temples followed, using fine-grained stone brought from quarries near the Ken River.

Several temples can be dated by inscriptions. The Lakshmana temple, dedicated to Vishnu, carries an inscription of 954 linked to Yashovarman and Dhanga. The Vishvanatha temple, dedicated to Shiva, has an inscription of Dhanga dated to about 1002. The Kandariya Mahadeva temple, the largest, is usually dated to about 1025–1050 and attributed to the reign of Vidyadhara.

The temples are divided by modern scholars into western, eastern and southern groups. The western group contains the best-known Hindu temples. The eastern group includes Jain temples such as the Parshvanatha temple of the mid-tenth century, showing that the Chandelas patronised more than one faith. A few temples, such as the Duladeo, date from the late eleventh or early twelfth century.

Architecture

The Khajuraho temples belong to the Nagara style of north India. Each stands on a high stone platform and is built on an east–west axis. Visitors pass through a sequence of halls: an entrance porch, a hall (mandapa), often a larger great hall, a vestibule, and finally the dark inner sanctum (garbhagriha) that houses the image of the deity.

Above the sanctum rises the main tower, the shikhara. At Khajuraho this tower is surrounded by many smaller copies of itself clustered up its sides, so that the whole temple appears to climb like a mountain range. This was deliberate: the temple was imagined as a model of Mount Meru or Mount Kailasa, the sacred mountains of Hindu cosmology.

The Kandariya Mahadeva temple shows the style at its most developed. Its tower reaches about 30 metres, and its walls carry several hundred sculptures arranged in horizontal bands. Larger temples include an inner walkway around the sanctum so worshippers could circle the deity.

Religion and patronage

The temples reflect the religious variety of the Chandela court. Most of the large Hindu temples are dedicated to Shiva or Vishnu, but others honour the sun god Surya, as at the Chitragupta temple, and various forms of the goddess. The Jain temples of the eastern group were funded largely by wealthy merchants, showing that the court and the trading class both invested in temple building.

Inscriptions describe the kings as generous patrons who gave land, villages and treasure to the gods. Building a temple was an act of religious merit, but it was also political. A great temple displayed the wealth of a dynasty and announced its claim to rule. The Lakshmana temple inscription, for example, records that Yashovarman obtained a prized image of Vishnu from the Pratihara king Devapala, a sign of growing Chandela prestige.

The temples also employed priests, musicians, dancers and craftsmen, and the site probably supported a sizable town, although little of its houses and palaces survives. Archaeologists have found traces of water tanks, ponds and other buildings around the temple groups.

Building on this scale required large teams of masons and sculptors. Their names are rarely recorded, but the quality of the work shows that they were highly trained specialists, working within a tradition shared across northern and central India.

The sculpture

Khajuraho is best known for its carving. Gods and goddesses, guardian figures, musicians and dancers fill the outer walls. Especially admired are the surasundaris, graceful celestial women shown dressing, applying make-up, playing with a ball or removing a thorn from a foot.

The erotic sculptures that made the site famous form only a small part of the whole, often estimated at around 10 per cent. They are concentrated on certain parts of the walls, especially near the junction of the hall and sanctum. Scholars have offered several explanations: that they express ideas from Tantric traditions, that they were auspicious symbols of fertility and abundance, or that they reflected courtly culture. No single interpretation is accepted by all, and Devangana Desai and others have stressed that such imagery was common on Indian temples of the period.

Other carvings show processions, hunting, soldiers, teachers with students and craftsmen at work, offering a rare picture of everyday life in medieval India.

Decline and rediscovery

Chandela power faded after the twelfth century, especially after the Delhi Sultanate’s general Qutb ud-Din Aibak took Kalinjar in 1202–1203. Khajuraho, never a fortified city, lost its political importance. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta passed through in the 1330s and mentioned ascetics living near the temples.

Its relative remoteness helped protect the site, although many temples collapsed or were dismantled over time. Local people continued to worship at the Matangeshvara temple, which remains in use today.

In 1838 Captain T. S. Burt, a British army engineer, was guided to the site and published an account of it. Alexander Cunningham, later the first head of the Archaeological Survey of India, surveyed the temples in 1852 and again in the 1860s, recording many of the inscriptions.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Khajuraho is a “Kama Sutra temple” devoted to sex. Fact: The temples are places of worship of Shiva, Vishnu, the Jain teachers and other deities. Erotic scenes are a minor part of the decoration and are not illustrations of the Kama Sutra.
• Myth: The temples were lost in the jungle until a British officer found them. Fact: Local people knew the site and worshipped there; Burt’s visit only introduced it to European readers.
• Myth: Exactly 85 temples once stood here. Fact: The figure comes from tradition and is uncertain; about 25 survive.

Timeline

• c. 831: Traditional date for Nannuka, founder of the Chandela line.
• Late 9th or early 10th century: Chausath Yogini temple built.
• 954: Inscription of the Lakshmana temple.
• c. 1002: Inscription of Dhanga in the Vishvanatha temple.
• c. 1025–1050: Kandariya Mahadeva temple built.
• 1202–1203: Kalinjar falls to the Delhi Sultanate.
• 1838: T. S. Burt visits and reports on the temples.
• 1986: Khajuraho becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Khajuraho shows how a regional dynasty could turn wealth and piety into monumental art. Its temples preserve, in stone, the religious ideas, aesthetic ideals and daily life of tenth- and eleventh-century India, and they remain a high point of the Nagara tradition, comparable to later works such as the Konark Sun Temple.