The Enigma of Udayeshwara Temple

Mahalaya as a Smaraka

 It was a Shravan Somvar, and I think it was also Ekadashi day when we set out from Udayagiri to visit Eran which was our main destination. We had also intended to cover Gyaraspur and Udayapur that day - the Neelakanteshwar temple pictures were etched in mind and it was not to be missed. Eran was difficult to reach, but the quiet and peaceful village and the sight of the beautiful Varaha made our day.  Udayapur in contrast was an easy location to find, much more populated, and that particular day wore a festive look as pilgrims thronged for worship, being the Shravan Somvar. All through the route there were fruits, tea, water being offered to pilgrims, and small or big, broken or intact every temple had devout carrying flowers, water, offerings.

 At the Neelakanteshwara temple queues were long to enter the sanctum sanctorum. Temple was full of village groups, bhajan mandalis singing, conducting pujas on their own to the murtis around the temple. That the murtis were mutilated did not affect them. The divinity is still there and the reverence of devotees ignored the structural damages.

 As seen in pictures online and in books, the red sandstone temple was imposing, it awed me. I had to look beyond the mass of pilgrims to see the finer nuances of the temple. The Neelakanteshwar temple is one of the finest, and a complete Bhumija shikara style available to us today from Madhya Pradesh. Vidisha is a pride of central India, boasts of many ancient temples, records of history and the Udayeshwara/Neelakanteshwara temple at Udayapur is one such. If Bhoja’s mighty temple at Bhojpur stands incomplete for whatever reasons, credit to his successor Udayaditya for having completed a fine temple, if not as massive in scale as Bhojpur, but exquisite in composition, scale and executed in record time. Two inscriptions have left clear evidence of its date, of having been built during the reign of Paramara king Udayaditya between 1059 and 1080 CE.

Many a times I am asked for the terms to be explained. Though it may take much space to go in detail would only like to quote here the text book definition of Bhumija temple – “The bhumija variation has a flat vertical projection in the centre of each of the four sides, the quadrants between being filled with rows of miniature shrines all the way up to the top of the tower. The bhumija temple was particularly popular in Malwa, in the western part of Madhya Pradesh, and the Deccan; an example is the 11^th century Udayeshvara temple at Udayapur, Madhya Pradesh”.  The north Indian temple style is broadly categorised as the Nagara style as opposed to the Dravida style we are familiar with in the south, especially Tamil Nadu, Andhra and in some parts of Karnataka. If you can see the Khajuraho Lakshmana temple, it is the example of one of the familiar varieties of Nagara, the Shekhari shikaras and the Neelakanteshwara temple here is the Bhumija shikara. The style visually we can differentiate:

You can see from the sketch here and also from the sketch explaining the components of Bhumija shikara the importance of the Udayeshwara temple. We have a Bhoramdeo temple in the present-day Chhattisgarh a fine example of Bhumija temple, and many in Maharashtra. But, Udayapur is the best in class and indeed we are lucky that it has survived in full.

“Not only is the Udayeshvara temple an important edifice within the trajectory of the dynasty, it is an architecturally significant structure. With its shrine composed of superimposed pillar-like components crowned by miniature spires, the Udayeshvara temple is one of the earliest examples of the Bhumija mode surviving in its entirety. This mode is one of the final major evolutions of temple architecture in North India; it lies in the context of an architectural renewal initiated in the tenth century by the creation of composite temples which reveal clearly how Indian architecture was thought in term of aedicules.”

 I would not get into arguments over the emperors seeking “legitimacy” in building a large temple or seeking glory for the dynasty in such an act – there may or may not be a case for such. Let us accept that building temples is not only an act of piety but also an act of patronage. Without power and patronage such magnificent temples cannot come up. Without faith and acceptance in the divine manifesting as a deity it definitely cannot happen. What is of significance to mention here is that it came up in Malwa at a time of political and religious turbulence with iconoclastic invaders making inroads. Udayaditya has been hailed as the worthy successor of Bhoja and not the one who came to rule soon after Bhoja, Jayasimha.

 “Udayapur reflects the king’s determination to restore the glory of the dynasty and despite the smaller size of the Udayeshvara temple compared to the temple at Bhojpur and the Bijamandal at Vidisha, it is of similar ambition. The red sandstone edifice open to the east rises on a vast platform surrounded by now ruined sub-shrines and a pavilion. Udayaditya’s successors remained in control of the region until the end of the thirteenth century, as several inscriptions engraved on the Udayeshvara temple attest to the occupation of the site”. 

 The sacrality of space and the kingship, deity association gets reinforced when studies like the ones on its attempted desecration later is done – “He backed his victories with multiple matrimonial alliances and articulated his political and ritualistic authority over the subject population through the religious cult of the Udaleshwar. Udayaditya was clearly the eponym for the deity visualised in the typical cult object of the Mahalingam which sits in the sanctum sanctorum of the Udayeshwara temple. The temple and its deity’s direct association with Udayaditya also added a political sacrality to the space, which was precisely the reason it had to be dismantled when a new political order set in.” It is interesting isn’t it how time and again destruction of the temples get legitimized through the projection of the temple as representing the power of the king. At the same time the temples are shown as spaces and deities created by the kings to claim legitimacy. The paradox gets repeated again and again. What was the reason Udayaditya hastened the construction of the temple within 10-years of his reign that lasted 23-years?

 I had not read much on the temple before visiting it. So, all these are later additions to my contemplation on what and how of the temple’s history, execution. In fact, in the celebrations and the crowd it was easy for me to even miss the mosque that had come up within the complex, complete with the inscriptions. Honestly, I noticed the inscription only when I was editing my photos. While being there what struck me most was the iconographic theme on the outer walls. From the photos you can guess how it was not a day when one could have spent time going through each of the icons in situ. Glancing from a distance the most noticeable were the forms of Shiva that were fierce – Natesa seemed to be a rudra tandava, then the Tripurantaka, Andhakasura, the Devis too – Chamunda and Mahishasuramardini.

“The dance appears as a recurrent theme on the mukhamandapas. The dance echoes to the alternation of the cosmic cycle as Shiva dances at the moment of the universal destruction and the annihilation of the worlds is necessary to the advent of a new creation. The choice of the dance, an expression of the oscillation between the creation and destruction of the universe, seems to be particularly pertinent for the adornment of the mukhamandapas as they operate as the passage between the inside and the outside of the temple”. Though Doria Tichit explains the iconography as significant, but confirming to the other Shiva temples of the Parmara period, the destructive and fierce deities represented on the walls seemed to suggest what Udayaditya might have wanted to express about his times. Or what he foresaw of the future and the need for protection from attacks. After Bhoja, his immediate successor was not celebrated, and it was Udayaditya who was seen as the son who had risen, a worthy successor of Bhoja. A further study of the iconography along with this history as well as the texts might give a complete picture of what the representations really indicate to us, the ones seeing them centuries later, centuries after their mutilation.

Things that we tend not to know as lay pilgrims, devotees, are the expressions and the academic explanations offered on the destructions, reconstructions on the sacred site as “repurposing” “reuse” “political acts” etc., In an earlier blog I had mentioned on how the Rudramahalaya’s destruction and attempted conversion into a mosque is studied as “repurposing” a building. Similarly in the case of Udayeshwara temple is a paper which talks about “typical desecration, reuse, and restructuring programme, which was part of the Delhi Sultanate’s military conquest of a region”.

 We know the story of Bijamandala at Vidisha, the Bhojashala at Dhar and Udayeshwara during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq when the governor of Chanderi, Izz-ud-Din Bantanai who undertook to “desecrate the monumentality of the Udayeshwara to indicate the disruption of the old political order and reflect the new political realities of the region”.  Alexander Cunningham had left a record of his visit to Udayapur with a mention of a mosque at the back of the temple, destruction of one temple in the north-west corner and the western vedi to build a mosque in the times of Tughluq.

 Like the studies on the “repurposing” here is one that talks about the difference in the pattern of destruction quoting Richard Eaton to say that temple destruction was a political act, as “a normal means of decoupling a Hindu king’s legitimate authority from his kingdom, and specifically, of decoupling that former king from the image of the state deity that was publicly understood as protecting the king and his deity”. Wonder if citizens in the normal course would give up on their king or understand the delegitimzation of the king or give up on the deity when such an act is carried out. Would that also indicate one wonders that the citizens give up their faith in that deity and convert as much as giving up on their king. Further in this case, the author argues “this destruction-restructuring program was unconventional as it did not seem to desire a complete annihilation of the site or the structure”. A generous act, or blunting the sensibilities of a populace that worships there, to show them what they have been left with? What happens to them if they do not surrender?

                                              

Only a minor temple at the back was brought down we are told, actually that minor temple should alter the nature of the temple since it is mentioned as a saptyatana temple, meaning there were seven subsidiary shrines to the main temple … “that the monument was open to pilgrimage processions and related rituals, leads one to question the assumed ‘violent’ nature of such acts of political iconoclasm.

Indeed, the inscriptions at the temple suggest that pilgrims continued to visit the temple site for a large part of the 14th and 15th centuries and dated inscriptions till 1447 are available to attest this. This indicates that the religious and devotional structures woven around the monument or its monumentality did not alter significantly in the reign of the Delhi and the Malwa Sultans”.

 Interesting isn’t it that then, as now, pilgrims continued to worship despite the visible signs of destruction (clear signs of iconoclasm? Or else what would explain mutilation of murtis) … Not breaking it down completely like the Bijamandal at Vidisha, would that mean that there was a generosity on the part of the iconoclasts? See the distinction being made of it as “political iconoclasm”. Strange isn’t that the “political iconoclasm” did not stop with vandalism but built a mosque in place of one of the smaller temples in the complex? We do not know the reason for continued worship at the temple, I can only see the faith and attachment the devotees have to the deity more than anything else.

 Actually, if we attempt, we may be able to “deconstruct” a lot of theorizing on the part of academic studies perhaps consciously to blunt the impact of what one sees all around Central and North India from the medieval, later medieval periods. Yet, what purpose would that serve, a mere post-mortem of each of the theories advanced based on certain assumptions, sometimes assisted by a thin thread of history from epigraphy.

 Take for instance this para from the work I have cited before: “At a more complex level, the intentionality of commissioning a temple with more non-functional elements, such as the temple’s rich and complex iconographic program, its massive scale, or the multiplicity of its entrances, than functional elements indicate that the purpose of commissioning the temple was more than to merely serve the quotidian spiritual needs of the people”. This is either naïve or ignorant of what a temple as a whole is supposed to be … for every theoretical work on architecture and iconography are written off as later attempts with no connection to constructed temples. Or explain the massive structures as megalomania of the kings and reinforcing their political authority.

 We have to live with a lot of assumptions indeed: “If the local populace at Udaypura had agreed to pay the jizyah (a religious tax on non-Muslims), then they would have acquired the zimmi status which would have made the state the guardian of their life and property, thus securing the temple’s monumentality”. We have to be happy about the fact that the “monumentality” of the temple was not destroyed and that it perhaps was not “affected” by Tughluq himself but by a sub-provincial level Sultanate officer. May be the rich agricultural province provided enough jizyah revenue to the Sultanate officer to keep the monument intact so as to let the Dhimmi Hindus continue worship paying Jizyah. Interesting exercise to reap Phds and professional degrees perhaps. Reality is stark as broken murtis, signature attempts at “reuse” “repurposing” can get any pilgrim or tourist to contemplate.  A naïve me thought if the Hindu kings were reckless enough to build monuments as political symbols that would be under attack on the line of war with opponents. Did Bhoja’s successor not know the tattva behind the structures, not aware of Bhoja’s ‘Samarangana Sutradhara’?

 From iconography my mind and readings wandered into the political questions and the idea of monumentality left intact. I am left with only one thought – the fierceness of the iconography and the aesthetics of the temple definitely has a message, message of its times, but that wasn’t purely political but a religious idea set in a political backdrop. That it was not a “monument” but a temple for the destroyer of the evil, a slayer of the asuras, not an assertion of political power. Because that assumption would mean the king was ready for the attack on a place of worship in case of a political strife. When did the temple become a monument?

                                               

Ref: ‘Monuments and Monumentality in a Changing Socio-PoliticalLandscape: A View from Udaypura’ - Rafia Khan

 ‘The Royal Temple : The Udayeshvara at Udayapur’ – Doria Tichit 

Credits: All the photographs are mine, the illustrations of the Shikaras taken from internet