The first temples: from caves to towers of stone · देवालय

In the early Vedic age there were no temples — only fire altars under the open sky. Within a thousand years India would carve an entire temple out of a single mountain of rock. Follow the journey of the Hindu temple.

[Historical scholarship]

Vedic worship centred on the yajna, performed at fire altars that were often temporary. Images of deities and shrines appear clearly in the historical record from the last centuries BCE, alongside Buddhist and Jain stupas and cave-monasteries. The great age of the Hindu stone temple begins in the Gupta period (4th–6th centuries CE).

[Archaeological evidence]

At Udayagiri near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, around 401 CE, in the reign of Chandragupta II, sculptors carved into a sandstone hill one of the greatest masterpieces of Indian art: Vishnu as Varaha, the cosmic boar, lifting the Earth goddess from the waters, while rows of sages and gods watch. Scholars read it also as a political statement of the Gupta king as protector. From such cave shrines, builders learned to raise free-standing temples — and within four centuries they would do something almost unbelievable at Ellora…

• The Kailasa temple — carved from one rock
• The laboratories of temple building
• The great temples
• Myths and facts
• Temples and society
• What we can learn

Read every chapter with Wisdom Library membership →

• Michael Meister & M. A. Dhaky — Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture
• George Michell — The Hindu Temple (1977)
• UNESCO World Heritage — Ellora (1983), Pattadakal (1987), Mamallapuram (1984), Great Living Chola Temples (1987/2004), Konark (1984), Ramappa (2021)