Stand close to a temple wall in Bishnupur and it stops being a wall. It is Krishna dancing with the gopis in a ring. It is Rama’s army crossing to Lanka. It is a hunting party, a boat on a river, a wedding procession.
Every scene is a few inches high, and every one was pressed into wet clay and baked over three and a half centuries ago.
Bishnupur, in Bankura district, was for centuries the capital of the Malla kings of Mallabhum. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they filled it with temples, and because the alluvial plains of Bengal have almost no building stone, they built them in brick and terracotta: baked clay, carved and fired into panels, covering the walls from plinth to roof.
The Malla kings
The Mallas’ own tradition traces their line back to the end of the first millennium. Their great age began with Bir Hambir around 1600, whom tradition credits with turning to Vaishnavism, the worship of Krishna. From then on the Malla kings poured their wealth into temples for Krishna, and into music: Bishnupur gave its name to a school of classical music, the Bishnupur gharana.
The temples
Rasmancha
রাসমঞ্চ · c. 1600
Not a temple for daily worship but a stage. Bir Hambir built it around 1600 for the Ras festival: once a year, the images of Radha and Krishna from every temple in town were brought here and displayed for the whole town to see. Its stepped pyramid roof over a square of arched galleries is like nothing else in Bengal.
Shyam Rai
শ্যামরায় · 1643
Built by Raghunath Singha in 1643, with five towers (pancharatna). It is the most richly carved temple in Bishnupur: look for the great wheel of the ras-lila, Krishna dancing in a ring with the gopis.
Jor Bangla (Keshta Rai)
জোড়বাংলা · 1655
Raghunath Singha’s second masterpiece, from 1655. It is two Bengali village huts, with their curved thatch roofs, joined together and rebuilt in brick. That curved roof, the do-chala, is Bengal’s gift to Indian architecture: it travelled as far as the Mughal palaces.
Madan Mohan
মদনমোহন · 1694
Built by Durjan Singha in 1694 for Krishna as Madan Mohan, the family deity of the Mallas. It is still a living temple, and the deity at the centre of Bishnupur’s favourite legend.
Dalmadal: the cannon a god fired
Near the Chhinnamasta temple lies Dalmadal, a huge iron cannon nearly four metres long, made by forge-welding iron rings together. It is usually dated to 1742, under Raja Gopal Singha, the years when Maratha cavalry, the bargis, were raiding western Bengal.
The legend says that when the Marathas reached the gates, the king was at prayer and would not stop. Madan Mohan himself went down to the walls and fired Dalmadal, and the raiders fled. Bengalis still sing a lullaby about the bargis coming to raid; in Bishnupur, the story has a happier ending.
Bishnupur’s living crafts
- Baluchari saris, woven with scenes from the epics in the border and pallu, the same stories the temple walls tell.
- The Bankura horse, the long-necked terracotta horse from nearby Panchmura, now a symbol of Bengali craft.
- Dokra metal casting, and conch-shell work, in the villages around.