Nagara temple architecture

The Nagara temple is the northern style: a curvilinear tower, the shikhara, rising over the sanctum in a continuous concave curve rather than in storeys, topped by a ribbed disc and a pot. Where the Dravida tower steps, this one bends. The temple usually stands on a raised plinth with no enclosing wall and no gateway towers, so it is a sculpted object seen from outside rather than a walled precinct entered. Khajuraho, Konark, Modhera and the Odisha temples are the style at its fullest.

The sanctum is square, with the shikhara over it in a curve made of repeated miniature shikhara motifs, the urushringa. Three main subtypes: Latina, a single curved tower; Shekhari, with clustered subsidiary spires climbing it; and Bhumija, with rows of miniature shrines in vertical bands. The amalaka, a ribbed stone disc, sits at the top under the kalasha pot. The mandapa is in front, sometimes several in a line with the whole roofline rising towards the shikhara. Odisha uses its own vocabulary, deul for the tower and jagamohana for the hall.

The same shastraic tradition as the south, with the Samarangana Sutradhara and regional texts giving the proportions, but the hereditary building lineages were broken far more thoroughly in the north by centuries of political disruption. Modern temple building in the style is largely done by firms, with the Sompura families of Gujarat the main continuous line; Chandrakant Sompura, who designed the Somnath reconstruction and the Ayodhya temple, is the fifteenth generation of one. Training in those families runs from childhood and takes decades.

The style is traced from the Gupta period shrines through the great regional schools: Khajuraho under the Chandelas, the Solanki temples of Gujarat, the Odisha deuls at Bhubaneswar and Konark, and the Kashmiri temples with their own peaked roofs. Large numbers of northern temples were destroyed between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries and many surviving ones are reconstructions, so the continuity of the northern tradition is materially different from the southern, where the great temples have been in continuous worship. Historians and the building families differ on how much of the living practice is recovered from texts and how much is inherited.

North India

Khajuraho, the Chandela and Pratihara temples, and the Himalayan variants in wood and stone.

Odisha

The Kalinga school, with the deul and jagamohana vocabulary, at Bhubaneswar, Puri and Konark.

Gujarat

The Solanki temples at Modhera and the stepwells, and the Sompura building families who still work in the style.

Kashmir

The Kashmiri temples at Martand and Avantipur use peaked roofs and a trefoil arch found nowhere else in India.

Deities

• Siva
• Vishnu
• Surya
• Durga

Festivals

• Maha Shivaratri
• Jagannath Rath Yatra

Temples

• Somnath Jyotirlinga
• Konark Sun Temple
• Sri Jagannath Temple, Puri
• Sun Temple, Modhera

Related arts

• Dravida temple architecture