01The king and the sacrifice
Govinda Manikya ruled Tripura in two spells in the mid-17th century and built this temple near his palace on the Gomati. Tagore took the story of his reign, from the Rajmala, for Rajarshi (1887) and Bisarjan (1890), in which a king who has seen a child’s grief over a sacrificed goat forbids blood offerings at the temple, and the court priest turns against him. The play is fiction built on history, but it made the temple known across Bengal.
02The temple
The temple is small, square, of brick, with the curved chala roof of Bengal topped by a short tower, and stands on a high plinth looking over the river. It is a protected monument. Udaipur, once Rangamati, has many other temples of the Manikya kings, and the Tripura Sundari shrine is a few kilometres away.
The life of this place
- 1660–1675Govinda Manikya builds the Bhubaneswari temple.
- 1887Tagore’s Rajarshi, set here, is published.
At Rajnagar near Udaipur, about 55 km south of Agartala.
