Kandariya Mahadeva Temple

About

Rising from a high plinth in Khajuraho village in Madhya Pradesh, the Kandariya Mahadeva Mandir is the crowning monument of the western temple group built by the Chandela rulers. Its name, the Great God of the Cave, gestures to Shiva enshrined within the cave-like garbhagriha at the heart of the great stone mountain raised above it.

The temple stands thirty-one metres tall, with a length of about the same and a width of twenty metres. Its superstructure is built up of clustered subsidiary spires that ascend in stages, eighty-four miniature shikharas in all, gathering into a single great central shikhara that rises like Mount Meru.

Devotees enter through a delicately carved torana arch chiselled from a single stone, and pass through a sequence of porches, mandapas, and the vestibule before reaching the sanctum where the Shivalinga is installed. The interior and exterior walls bear bands of sculpture depicting gods, goddesses, divine couples, ascetics, dancers, and scenes from devotional life, in deeply carved Nagara idiom.

Together with the Lakshmana and Vishvanatha temples, Kandariya Mahadeva forms a cosmic triad of Shaiva sanctuaries. The Khajuraho temples were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986.

History

Khajuraho was once the capital of the Chandela dynasty, and across the eleventh and twelfth centuries successive rulers raised temples here dedicated to Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, the Devi, and the Jain Tirthankaras. The Kandariya Mahadeva Mandir was built during the reign of King Vidyadhara, who ruled from about 1003 to 1035 CE.

Vidyadhara was a powerful king who successfully resisted two campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, in 1019 and 1022. After the second campaign ended in a truce, Vidyadhara is traditionally said to have commissioned this great Shiva temple in thanksgiving and victory. An inscription on a pilaster of the mandapa names the builder as Virimda, which scholars take to be another name for Vidyadhara. The temple is dated to a period between roughly 1025 and 1050 CE.

Significance

Kandariya Mahadeva is regarded as the supreme achievement of the Khajuraho group and one of the finest expressions of Chandela-era Shaiva architecture and sculpture. As an earthly Mount Meru raised by a king in honour of his family deity, it gathers cosmology, kingship, and devotion into a single vision in stone.