The Bhojpur Temple Near Bhopal, Begun for King Bhoja in the 11th Century, Has Its Architectural Drawings Cut Into the Rock Beside It, and a Reconstruction From Them Puts Its Tower at 100 Metres or More

The Bhojpur temple, on the Betwa river in Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, was begun in the 11th century for the Paramara king Bhoja and never finished, yet its plans survive. Architectural drawings are engraved on the rocks around it, and the architectural historian Adam Hardy of Cardiff University says many of them are 1:1 details of the part that was built. In his own words, they “hold the key to the temple’s intended design”, which he judges would have made it “by far the biggest Hindu temple in the world”.

India’s submission to UNESCO’s Tentative List says the finished temple would have stood at least 100 m high. That is a reconstruction of what was intended, not a measurement of anything built. The scholars and officials who have written about the site also give different reasons for why the work stopped, and this piece sets out what each of them says.

What the rocks around the temple hold

The village of Bhojpur lies about 28 to 30 km from Bhopal, depending on whether you follow the Ministry of Tourism’s page or the heritage site Puratattva. The Indian submission to UNESCO lists what survives near the temple: drawings of the layout, the pillared hall (mandapa), pillars, lintels, doorways, capitals and column spacing, all carved on nearby rocks, along with unused carved blocks and the earthen ramps made to lift them. The submission says the drawings match the existing temple, which is how they reveal what was planned.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), which published Hardy’s book in 2015, describes the drawings as documented there “for the first time”, giving insight into construction processes and temple forms not known elsewhere. They were not unknown before that. Puratattva, summarising a 1983 paper by M. N. Deshpande, says the rocks with the line drawings were fenced off while he was Director General of Archaeology for the Madhya Pradesh government. Hardy’s 2015 book is the full published record, with the Sanskrit translated by Mattia Salvini, and Crispin Branfoot reviewed it in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in July 2016.

Bhojpur was the centre-piece of a wider project, The Indian Temple: Production, Place and Patronage, which, according to the project page, secured funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Its directors were Hardy, Daud Ali and Michael Willis, working with O. P. Mishra of Bhopal and Vishwamohan Jha of Delhi. The project description says the quarries there, with rock drawings and unfinished architectural parts, are a unique survival that gives insight into medieval design and construction.

What stands there today

The temple is a square building on a high plinth, 20.1 m on each side outside according to the Indian submission. The sanctum has a huge doorway on the west, four columns 12 m high inside it, and a ceiling the submission calls incomplete. Three sides carry blind balconies and no carving. Captain J. D. Cunningham, the British political agent at Bhopal, measured the base at about 62 feet square in his 1847 report and guessed the four pillars at about 40 feet. The two figures are close.

Inside stands the lingam, the Shiva emblem the temple was built to house. The Indian submission gives it as about 2.3 m high and 5.4 m round, on a pedestal about 8 m high, and says it is carved from a single stone. Cunningham gave 7 feet 2 inches in height and 5 feet 3 inches across, resting on one block 19.5 feet square. Madhya Pradesh Tourism says it is made of three limestone blocks stacked together, so the sources differ on whether it is one stone or three.

For centuries the sanctum was open to the sky. The submission says the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) Bhopal Circle recently covered it with a fibreglass ceiling, a reversible change and the only addition to the structure. NewsBharati dates the ASI’s conservation work to 2006 and 2007 under the archaeologist K. K. Muhammed.

A ramp, a keystone and 1,300 masons’ marks

Two 19th-century visitors recorded the building site as it was. Cunningham saw a ramp of earth and rubbish against the east side of the temple, still showing how heavy blocks were raised. He also found partly worked stones on the sandstone hill within 300 yards, one of them the half-shaped crowning stone of the dome, 11 feet square and 5 feet thick. W. Kincaid, writing in the Indian Antiquary in 1888, called the temple probably the only one in India that, left unfinished, still shows the ramp up which the huge blocks for walls and roofs were rolled.

The building carries its workforce’s signatures. Brill’s abstract of Kirit Mankodi’s 1986 article in Marg says the temple is the only shrine that can definitely be attributed to Bhoja, and that because it was abandoned before completion, much evidence of the mechanics of temple construction remains at the site. Puratattva reports his estimate of the labour force from about 1,300 masons’ marks and names engraved on the building and at the quarries. Deshpande, in the same summary, took the site as a visual record of the phases of construction and suggested Bhoja may have set up a training school for temple craftsmen there.

The temple Hardy reconstructs

The temple as it stands is the sanctum and a walkway around it. In Puratattva’s summary of Hardy’s 2014 chapter, Bhojpur is not obviously a Bhumija temple, the northern type favoured by the Paramaras, whose tower carries rows of miniature shrines. The detailing in the drawings, however, shows craftsmen who specialised in it. The same summary says Hardy’s team studied five of more than twenty significant drawings, reads the finished building as a sarvatobhadra plan (an entrance on each of four sides), and gives it a seven-storey tower, which Hardy found hard to bring under 100 m.

The Indian submission reads one part differently. It says the raised platform in front of the west door was probably designed after Bhoja’s reign for a hall that was also left incomplete. The summary of Hardy gives four entrances. This article could not reconcile the two readings and states both.

The reconstruction leans on a text. The Samaranganasutradhara is a compendium of architectural knowledge attributed to Bhoja, which IGNCA says was compiled when the classical traditions of Indian architecture had matured and could be understood in relation to one another. The Indian submission says Bhoja wrote it and that the temple follows its rules. Hardy’s own wording is “attributed”. His 2013 research note says the text’s chapter on Bhumija temples sets out the logic of their star-shaped plans, and that its instructions are conceived in terms of drawings.

Why work stopped: who says what

No page read for this article cites an inscription or chronicle that gives the reason. Cunningham wrote that no formal inscription had been found and that, since the temple was never finished, probably none was ever recorded. Several explanations are on the table.

Deshpande, as summarised by Puratattva, thought work was probably discontinued after Bhoja’s death and stopped suddenly. The project page dates the abandonment to the mid-11th century, and Puratattva gives Bhoja’s reign as 1010 to 1055. The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page says some attribute the halt to a natural calamity or a shortage of resources.

K. K. Muhammed, who led the ASI conservation, has said, as NewsBharati reports it, that the structure could not bear the load of its stone roof, which fell, and that the king was then unable to rebuild. NewsBharati offers this as one reason among those historians have speculated on.

Mankodi raised the possibility that Bhojpur was a funerary monument rather than a temple in the usual sense. Puratattva says Krishna Deva first suggested a memorial shrine and that M. A. Dhaky found a text describing memorial temples with a roof of receding tiers in place of a tower. On that reading Bhoja built it for his father Sindhuraja or his uncle Munja. The counter-argument Puratattva records is that no such design appears among the temple types in Bhoja’s treatise.

Puratattva then reasons from Hardy’s reconstruction that Bhoja planned a Bhumija temple. It notes that the Paramara house was in turmoil after Bhoja’s death and restored by Udayaditya, who ruled from 1070 to 1093, and that Udayaditya consecrated the Udayeshvara temple at Udayapur around 1080. Money, it argues, was therefore not the obstacle, and the design itself may have been impractical, because a tower of that weight would probably have collapsed. Hardy’s own chapter was not available to read for this article, and the Cambridge review page shows only the record of the review. This last argument is therefore attributed to Puratattva and not to Hardy.

The lake and the dams

The temple was built beside an artificial lake. Cunningham, repeating the tradition recorded by Sir John Malcolm in 1823, wrote that the lake was formed by damming the Betwa and a hollow to the west, and from the remains judged that the Betwa embankment may have been about 100 feet high and perhaps 300 yards long at the top. He wrote that the lake would appear to have been 16 or 17 miles long and 7 or 8 miles wide. In the tradition he repeats, Sultan Hoshang Shah of Malwa destroyed the embankment, in the period he places in the 14th and 15th centuries when Malwa became a kingdom.

Madhya Pradesh Tourism describes three stone dams, the third near present Bhopal, and says Hoshang Shah drained the reservoir in the 15th century by breaking two of them. A site plan by Michael Willis, published in the Central India Archive in 2017 with the ASI as rights holder, marks the dams, the unfinished temple, the ruined palace of Bhoja and the possible extent of the flood zone in the Paramara period.

Visiting and status

Madhya Pradesh Tourism lists entry from 6 am to 7 pm, as checked on 2 November 2026, with October to March the favoured season. A Jain temple lies 3 to 4 km away. The page sets Bhojpur in a two-day itinerary from Bhopal that takes in the Bhimbetka rock shelters, about 30 km from the temple, and Sanchi. It also says the ASI looks after the temple. The site is an active place of worship. The Indian submission says thousands of devotees gather at Maha Shivratri, the festival of the wedding of Shiva and Parvati, and Madhya Pradesh Tourism says a cultural event, the Bhojpur Utsav, is held then. The page also records a National Tourism Award for Best Maintained and Disabled Friendly Monument in 2015, for 2013 to 2014.

The submission compares Bhojpur with the Chola temple at Thanjavur for scale and as a living temple, and the Great Living Chola Temples article covers that group. A Solanki-period counterpart from the same decades is the Modhera Sun Temple. UNESCO’s Tentative List page for India carries Bhojpur under criteria (i), (iii) and (iv), with the entry dated 8 February 2024.