Travel to Northern India: Bhubaneshwar: Photo 1

The temples of Bhubaneshwar belong to the northern or nagara style of Indian temples, which, radically unlike those of South India, have neither columns nor monumental gateways. Instead, the two key elements of the temples are a covered porch (in India broadly, this is the mandapa but it is locally called the jagmohana) and a sanctuary (broadly, the shikhara but locally the rekha). Both are on view here in Bhubaneshwar's Parashurameshvara Temple. Though the porch roof was dismantled and reassembled about 1900, the temple was built about 700 A.D. and shows an early stage in the local evolution of temples. The porch, for example, rests on the ground, not on an elevated platform, and it is rectangular, not square. The most dramatic difference between this temple and later ones is the porch's simple roof, which in later temples evolves into a much more complex form.

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