01Bhoja’s linga
Raja Bhoja of Dhara, the king-scholar who wrote on poetics, grammar and architecture, began this temple and never finished it. Four tall pillars carry a dome over a square sanctum. The linga is a single polished stone about 2.3 metres high, set on a three-tier platform, so that the whole stands some 7.5 metres. The walls stop short and the shikhar was never raised. Behind the temple you can still see the long earthen ramp the builders used to haul blocks up.
02Drawings on the rock
On the flat quarry rocks around the site, the masons engraved the plans and elevations of the temple, mouldings, pillars and the shikhar they meant to build, at working scale. Few such drawings survive anywhere in India. They show what the finished temple would have looked like. The temple is under the ASI, and worship goes on; the Mahashivaratri mela here draws villagers from all of Raisen and Bhopal.
The life of this place
- 11th centuryBegun by Raja Bhoja and left unfinished.
28 km south-east of Bhopal. Go early on Mahashivaratri or Shravan Mondays; the crowd builds fast.
