Rajarani Temple, Bhubaneswar

01A temple named for its stone

Rajarani stands in a garden east of the old town, with no murti and no daily puja. Inscriptions and old accounts call it Indreswara, but the name that stuck came from the masons’ word for the fine-grained sandstone, rajarania. The deul has no flat face. Its curved tower is built up from clusters of smaller tower-forms, each a copy of the whole, so that the spire seems to rise in waves. Odia temple builders did not repeat this experiment often, and scholars have long compared it with the Khajuraho towers of the same century.

02Guardians and nayikas

Walk round the sanctum and the eight dikpalas, the guardians of the directions, stand at their corners: Indra on his elephant in the east, Agni with his ram, Yama with his buffalo, Varuna with the noose. Between them the walls are crowded with nayikas, women caught in small moments: one looks into a mirror, one holds a child, one bends to take a thorn from her foot. These figures are the reason art students come here. Each January the Odisha government holds the Rajarani Music Festival of classical music on the lawns.

The life of this place