The Temple Where the Gods Have No Bodies

Fourteen gods live in this temple, and not one of them has a body.

Only heads. Fourteen faces, and nothing below them.

Visitors who know Hindu temples elsewhere almost always find that the most striking thing about the place, and it is not an accident or an economy. The devotion here is meant to settle on the face of each god, on the consciousness in it, rather than on the physical form other traditions carve out in full.

Who put them there

The temple stands near the old royal quarter of Agartala, in Tripura. The city's name comes from Bengali words for storehouse and heap, left over from an older life as a trading place.

King Krishna Manikya Debbarma built it in 1761.

He was not inventing a cult. The Manikya royal house had held these fourteen as its family gods for generations already. What the king did was give them a permanent building.

The Manikya dynasty ruled for several centuries, one of the longest continuous royal lines anywhere in India. And they did not treat these gods as one generation's private devotion. They treated them as the reason the family was fit to rule at all.