The Temple That Survived Because No One Bothered to Attack It

For a hundred years the Chandelas did almost nothing but build.

They ruled central India from Khajuraho, and between about 950 and 1050 they raised some eighty-five temples across roughly six square kilometres of their own capital. Hindu shrines and Jain ones, side by side.

No single king did it. One would build, and die, and his successor would build, and die, and the next would carry on. They seem to have understood the growing skyline of towers over their city as something none of them would live to see finished, a thing being made across generations rather than a monument to any one reign.

The great one

The largest is the Kandariya Mahadeva, raised under King Vidyadhara between about 1025 and 1050.

It belongs to Shiva. At its heart, in the garbhagriha, the chamber the tradition calls the womb, stands a lingam.

The base measures roughly a hundred and two feet by sixty-seven. The tower above it rises a full hundred and two feet.

And the tower is not one spire. It is a cascade, dozens of smaller spires clustered and climbing around a central peak, each a little higher than the last.