The Malla Kings of Bishnupur Raised Terracotta Temples Between About 1600 and 1758, and the ASI Rates the Jor Bangla of 1655 the Finest of the Group

Bishnupur, a town in Bankura district of West Bengal, holds a group of temples built of brick and laterite, many of them faced with clay panels that carry the Krishna story, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata across their walls. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) looks after the best known of them. Its page on the Jor Bangla temple says that from the richness of its ornament and the quality of the workmanship the temple “stands as the finest among the temples of Bishnupur”. On 3 July 1998 the ASI submitted “Temples at Bishnupur, West Bengal” to UNESCO’s Tentative List (reference 1087). The dated temples run from about 1600 to 1758, according to the ASI’s own site pages.

What UNESCO’s entry says

The Tentative List text is short. It says the temples are built in bricks and also in laterite, a rust-coloured stone of the region, and are mostly of the Eka-Ratna type: a single tower on a sloping roof over a square sanctum, with a porch on each side opening through three multi-cusped arches. It names Lalji, Kalachand, Radhashyam, Jormandir and Nandalal among them. A few have several towers, and the entry gives Shyam Rai, dated A.D. 1643, as the example. It describes the Jor Bangla (A.D. 1655) as two Dochala structures joined by a Charchala tower, and the Rasmancha (A.D. 1600) as a pyramidal roof on a spacious laterite plinth, with the sanctum ringed by three circumambulatory galleries.

A tentative listing is a country’s declared intention to nominate a site. As of 5 November 2026 UNESCO’s page for Bishnupur is still that Tentative List entry, and the temples are not an inscribed World Heritage Site.

The kings, the faith and the clay

The temples belong to the Malla rulers of Mallabhum, whose capital was Bishnupur. The ASI’s page on the Shyam Rai temple names Raghunath Simha as son and successor of Vir Hambir, and Sahapedia, the heritage portal, places Bir Hambir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The temples go with the Gaudiya Vaishnava movement, the devotional tradition of Krishna that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486 to 1533) founded. Sahapedia gives the account found in Gaudiya Vaishnava literature: the scholar Srinivasa Acharya came to Bishnupur carrying a cartload of the tradition’s manuscripts, Bir Hambir heard him speak of Krishna, and the king gave land and resources for a centre of devotion. Devotees hold that the forests around Bishnupur became a hidden Vrindavan, the grove where Krishna’s play is believed to continue. Sahapedia, summarising the art historian Pika Ghosh, adds that mid-eighteenth-century surveys put the number of temples in the region between 150 and 450, an estimate and not a count.

Clay came first because stone was scarce. Priyanka Mangaonkar’s 2011 paper, drawing on George Michell’s edition of David McCutchion’s papers, says Bengal had little building stone but plenty of alluvial soil, and that coarse laterite occurs mainly in the south-west of the province, where Bishnupur lies. She describes fired bricks laid in a mortar of powdered brick and lime, the lime made from snail shells, with the surface of each terracotta plaque keyed into the brick core of the wall. Her account rests on that one set of sources and is attributed here, not independently confirmed.

Hut roofs in brick

The roofs copy village huts. Sahapedia, following McCutchion, explains that the curved cornice comes from the bent bamboo eaves of Bengali cottages. A chala is such a sloping roof, a do-chala has two sides and a char-chala four. A jor bangla is two do-chala huts joined, the front one serving as porch and the rear one as shrine, and a ratna is a pinnacle set on the roof, so a pancha-ratna temple carries five. Sahapedia adds that the Bishnupur temples were turned to face south, where the north Indian temple custom it cites faces east, and that many have two altars in the lower sanctum, one east-facing for the priests and one south-facing toward the courtyard where devotees sing.

Rasmancha, about 1600

The Rasmancha carries the earliest date in UNESCO’s entry and is the odd one out in form. The ASI describes a square brick structure on a laterite plinth, with a small shrine in the centre, three corridors around it, a triple-arched face on each side and a truncated pyramidal roof. Four do-chalas once stood at the base on every side, with a char-chala at each corner, and the ASI says it has restored all the lost chalas in recent years. The Indian Statistical Institute’s Bishnupur Heritage Image Database, which draws on ASI notices, gives the platform as 24.5 metres square, the brick structure above it as 12.5 metres high and the ceiling as carried on 40 pillars.

The building is tied to a festival. The ASI says idols from other temples are put up in the Rasmancha every year for the Ras festival, and the Image Database says the annual celebration was held there until 1932. The ASI gives the date as “c. 1600 A.D.” by general opinion and adds that the blind arcade on the plinth may suggest a later one. The Bankura district site and the Bishnupur Municipality credit King Hambir with the building.

Shyam Rai, 1643

The Shyam Rai temple has the clearest date of the early group. The ASI says its foundation inscription credits Raghunath Simha with building it in 1643. It is a square, south-facing brick temple with five pinnacles on a low humped roof, the central one larger, and a triple-arched opening on every side. The Image Database gives the base as 11.4 metres square and the height above the platform as 10.7 metres, with an octagonal central tower and four square ones. The ASI says it is dedicated to Radhika Krishna and that terracotta covers every available space with Krishnalila episodes, scenes from the Puranas and daily life, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and geometric and arabesque patterns. It compares the profusion of ornament to the Kantaji temple at Kantanagar in Dinajpur district, Bangladesh.

The Bankura district site lists scenes on the Shyam Rai panels, among them Indra on his elephant, the Ram and Ravana story, Krishna’s play, Radha and Krishna, and hunting scenes, and a large wheel carved with Radha and Krishna among the gopis, the cowherd women of Krishna’s story.

Jor Bangla, 1655

The Jor Bangla, which the ASI says is traditionally known as Kestaraya, is two large do-chalas joined along their length with a small char-chala at the junction. Facing south on a nearly square platform, it uses the outer do-chala as the porch and the inner one as the sanctum, where a stucco figure of Sadabhuja Krishna stands on a high pedestal. The ASI says terracotta covers every side, even the inside of the porch and its ceiling. On the east and west walls, it says, the timber frame on which the do-chalas rest has been rendered so well in terracotta that it is a rare architectural work. The ASI’s page gives no year. UNESCO’s list and the Bankura district site both give 1655, and the district site names Raghunath Singh as the builder.

Sahapedia writes that the temple went up twelve years after Shyam Rai under the same patron, and that each row of panels tells one story in sequence: Krishna and Balaram as infants, their wrestling bouts in Mathura, the Kurukshetra battle with Bhishma on his bed of arrows, and scenes from the Ramlila, the staged Ramayana. The Bankura site adds the marriage of Ram and Sita, Parvati with her two sons and Lakshman with Surpanakha. Tuput has explainers on the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Krishna.

A century of later temples, and the dates that differ

The ASI’s foundation records carry the group forward. Raghunath Simha built the Kala Chand temple in 1656, in laterite with stucco, and Vira Simha built the Lalji in 1658 for images of Radha and Krishna. Durjana Simha built the Madanmohan in 1694, in brick on a large laterite plinth with terracotta plaques, to house the deity the ASI calls the tutelary deity of the Mallas. Gopala Simha raised the Jor Mandir group of one small and two large temples in 1726. The Radhamadhab, in laterite with a dochala hall for offerings, is dated to 1737 and was built by Siromanidevi, a consort of Vir Simha. The Radhashyam, which the ASI says Chaitanya Simha built in 1758, is the latest of the dated temples at the site.

Some sources differ. Sahapedia gives 1658 for Radha Shyam and 1747 for Radha Madhav, against the ASI’s 1758 and 1737, and this article follows the ASI because the monuments’ own custodian publishes those dates. The Bankura district site names Krishna Singh, not Gopala Simha, as builder of the Jor Mandir. A tourism page on the Incredible India site gives Raghunath Singh’s dates as 1702 to 1712, which cannot fit a 1643 foundation inscription. The Rasmancha’s own date carries the ASI’s caution quoted above.

How the panels were read

Sahapedia argues that the panels worked as picture aids for an audience that largely could not read: a priest or elder told the stories while listeners looked at the wall, and guides still do the same. Mangaonkar adds that the artists drew on Bengali poets’ retellings, sung and staged in villages, which is why some scenes show Bengali daily life. She writes that terracotta temple building declined from the early nineteenth century and that by the middle of it stucco was replacing terracotta. Artisans at Panchmura, a Bankura town not far from Bishnupur, now make thousands of panels modelled on the temple reliefs, Sahapedia says, and these are sold as souvenirs and used on newer buildings.

Keeping the carvings

A team at Visva-Bharati University studied the blackish-brown crust on the carvings of seven Bishnupur temples and reported 45 taxa of microalgae, 36 of them cyanobacteria. Their abstract says the crusts form a biofilm that damages the fine carving, that temple surfaces reach about 50 degrees Celsius in summer, and that the organisms survive the heat and sunlight with UV-screening pigments. As of 5 November 2026 the ASI’s list of ticketed monuments for its Bishnupur Sub-Circle shows three: the Shyam Rai temple, the Rasmancha and the Jor Bangla.