Khajuraho 50 photographs of the Chandela dynasty's Nagara-style temples

A century of temple-building, left to the jungle for a thousand years.

Khajuraho was once a capital of the Chandela dynasty, Rajput rulers who controlled the Jejakabhukti region — centred on the historic Bundelkhand area of what is now Madhya Pradesh — from roughly the 9th to the 11th century. At the height of their power, between approximately 950 and 1050 CE, successive Chandela rulers commissioned an extraordinary concentration of temple-building at Khajuraho: historical records suggest the site once held around 85 temples spread across roughly 20 square kilometres.

Survival through remoteness

Most of those original temples are gone. When the Chandela dynasty's power declined in the late 11th century and its rulers relocated to hill forts elsewhere, Khajuraho's religious significance persisted for a time but gradually faded from wider attention. Paradoxically, the site's relative remoteness — the very thing that may have limited its political importance in later centuries — is also credited with sparing many of its surviving temples from the deliberate destruction that affected Hindu and Jain monuments elsewhere in India under later rulers.

The temples simply fell out of common knowledge, gradually becoming overgrown. In 1838, British army captain T.S. Burt rediscovered the complex, bringing renewed attention to a site that had been quietly standing, largely undisturbed, for centuries. Of the original 85 temples, around 20 to 25 survive today, spread across a more compact area of roughly 6 square kilometres, and divided into three groups — Western, Eastern, and Southern.

Architecture and sculpture, in balance

Khajuraho's surviving temples — built almost entirely from hard river sandstone — are widely considered the finest examples of Nagara-style temple architecture in northern India, a tradition characterised by tall, curving shikhara towers that rise in stepped tiers above the temple's main shrine, often clustered together to create a mountain-like profile. The Kandariya Mahadeva temple, the largest at Khajuraho, is frequently singled out for the way its architecture and sculptural decoration are integrated into a single, unified composition — UNESCO describes its sculptural programme as among the greatest masterpieces of Indian art.

What the temples are perhaps best known for internationally is their sculpture — exterior walls covered in dense bands of figural carving depicting deities, celestial and mythological figures, and scenes drawn from daily, courtly, and spiritual life. This breadth is often lost in summaries that focus on a narrow subset of the carvings; taken as a whole, the friezes function as an extensive visual record of the period's religious, social, and artistic world, executed with a level of detail and craftsmanship that has made Khajuraho's sculpture a reference point for the study of medieval Indian art.

The Lakshmana Temple, dedicated to Vishnu and built around 954 CE under King Dhanga, follows a similar layout to Kandariya Mahadeva but is notable for its own distinct programme of carvings depicting deities and other figures along its walls. The Varaha Temple, by contrast, takes a different approach entirely — housing a large monolithic sculpture of Varaha, the boar incarnation of Vishnu, rendered in purely animal form.