Khajurāho Kandariya Mahādev

Khajurāho Kandariya Mahādev

The largest of the western temples

Kandariya Mahādeva is the largest and most complete of the western group at Khajurāho, in Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh. The Chandela temples of Khajurāho were built across roughly the tenth and eleventh centuries, at a moment when the Chandela dynasty was at the height of its power, and Kandariya Mahādeva — conventionally dated within that span — is the one that is conventionally taken as the masterpiece.

The temple is a Nagara-style śikhara-temple, and its scale is the point: a high curvilinear tower on a substantial platform, with subsidiary shrines and a dense programme of exterior sculpture in horizontal bands. What is visible today is a coherent ninth- and tenth-century complex in a state of exceptional preservation — which is not the same as saying it is untouched, since the Chhatarpur temple and the surrounding settlement have undergone centuries of use, repair, and reuse of fallen stone.

The temple is dedicated to Shiva, and its interior carries the liṅga that gives the name. It also contains other images, including a Rbhusambhava image traditionally credited to a later medieval addition. The exterior sculpture is the more discussed matter, and it is where the temple's reception has gone furthest wrong.

The erotic sculpture. Khajurāho is famous worldwide for the mithuna figures on its exterior. The claim that the temple is dedicated to sex, or that it was built as a "temple of erotica", is a modern tourism reading and it does not survive contact with the sculpture. The figure is a small proportion of the programme; the great majority of the exterior is devoted to the avatāra and attendant figures, celestial beings, musicians, dancers, animals and apsaras. A more careful reading — the one the scholarship supports — is that the mithuna figures belong to a coherent programme organised around the four puruṣārthas, the four aims of life: dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa. They are placed on the temple as a statement about the whole of life that human religious life is answerable to, not as a decoration in a different key from the rest. That reading has been argued at length in the art-historical literature and should be given rather than the popular version.

The other thing a temple like this is, in the first place, is still in use. Khajurāho is not a ruin. The Maṅgeśvara temple at the complex remains in active worship, and the great temples of the eastern group serve their communities. Khajurāho is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it supports a substantial Jain tradition alongside the Śaiva one — the Jain temples at the site, and the wider Jain presence in the region, are part of the same historical landscape.

The original number of temples is a matter of tradition — the figure of eighty-five is repeated — and should not be treated as an archaeological finding.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The dating of the temple within the tenth and eleventh centuries is conventional, not exact, and this entry does not have a basis for a narrower range than the conventional one.
• The erotic-sculpture proportion and the puruṣārtha reading are contested in the art-historical literature. Both should be attributed to the scholarship rather than stated as neutral description, and the popular "temple of love" framing should be named explicitly as the claim it is.
• The count of eighty-five original temples is traditional and should not be presented as established.
• No named source is carried in this entry's record. The Chandela-period temple architecture is extensively documented and should be cited properly.