Lakkundi

01Attimabbe’s Jinalaya

Lakkundi, Lokkigundi in the inscriptions, was a rich town under the Kalyani Chalukyas, with its own mint. About 1007 Attimabbe, widow of a Chalukya general and remembered as Danachintamani, the jewel of giving, built the Brahma Jinalaya here. She is said to have had a thousand copies of the poet Ponna’s Shantipurana written out and given away, along with 1,500 images of gold and jewels. The Jinalaya has a large seated Brahma in its hall, a sign of how freely Hindu and Jain devotion shared space in that age.

02Kashivishveshvara and the wells

The Kashivishveshvara temple, of the 11th–12th century, is a twin shrine: Shiva faces east and Surya, across a common platform, faces west. Its doorframes are carved in layer after layer of scroll, figure and pilaster so deep that light barely reaches the bottom of the cuts, and the tower carries kirtimukha faces at every tier. Around the village are dozens more shrines and several stepwells, the Musukina Bhavi among the finest, and local speech says Lakkundi once had a hundred and one temples and as many wells. The ASI sculpture gallery here gathers the loose pieces.

The life of this place