Before the temples
The area around Bhubaneswar has a long history. Sisupalgarh, on its outskirts, was a large fortified city of the last centuries BCE, often linked with the capital of ancient Kalinga. At Dhauli, a few kilometres south, a rock carries a version of Ashoka's edicts with the special edicts he addressed to the newly conquered province after the Kalinga war, and a carved elephant emerging from the rock. On the twin hills of Udayagiri and Khandagiri are Jain cave monasteries, one of them bearing the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela, the first-century BCE king of Kalinga.
The temple town
From the seventh century the town became a centre of Shiva worship, known as Ekamra Kshetra, and hundreds of temples were built around its sacred tank, the Bindu Sagar. Many survive, and they show the development of the Kalinga style over six centuries. Each temple has a sanctum with a curved tower, the rekha deul, and in front of it a hall with a pyramidal roof, the pidha deul.
The Parashurameshvara, of the seventh century, is among the oldest, small and richly carved. The Mukteshvara, of the tenth century, is a jewel-like temple with a carved gateway arch, the torana. The Vaital Deul, of the eighth century, is unusual: a temple of the fierce goddess Chamunda whose sanctum has an oblong barrel-vaulted roof, the khakhara form, related to the gateway towers of the south. The Rajarani, of the eleventh century, has no deity and is named after the reddish-gold stone it is built from; its tower is clustered with miniature towers and its walls carry graceful female figures.
The Lingaraja
The Lingaraja, the largest temple, was built in the eleventh century under the Somavamshi kings and completed under their successors. Its tower rises about forty-five metres, and the temple stands in a walled compound with many subsidiary shrines. Its deity, Shiva as Tribhuvaneshvara, "lord of the three worlds", gives the city its name. The temple is also unusual in that Vishnu is worshipped with Shiva, a sign of the Harihara cult. Only Hindus may enter. The Ananta Vasudeva temple, a temple of Vishnu built in the thirteenth century under the Eastern Gangas, stands nearby.
The architectural treatises of Odisha, such as the Bhuvanapradipa, give a vocabulary for the parts of these temples, and the style culminated in the great temples of Puri and Konark.
The modern capital
After independence, Odisha's capital moved from Cuttack to Bhubaneswar, and a new city was planned beside the old temple town by the German architect Otto Koenigsberger from 1948. It has grown into a large city, and the old town with its temples lies in its southern part.
Further reading
- Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988
- Meister, Michael W. Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture. American Institute of Indian Studies, 1983
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Eastern Ganga dynasty — The Eastern Gangas ruled Kalinga for nearly a thousand years, and under them the Jagannātha temple at Puri and the sun temple at Konark were built — the two monuments that define the religious landscape of Odisha.
- Kalinga War — The Kalinga War (c. 261 BCE) was the Mauryan emperor Ashoka's conquest of the independent kingdom of Kalinga on India's eastern coast, an episode whose recorded scale of bloodshed marked his turn toward Buddhist dhamma.
- Hindu temple architecture — The architectural tradition of Hindu temple building on the Indian subcontinent, spanning the Nagara style of the north, the Dravida style of the south, and the hybrid Vesara style of the Deccan, all grounded in the sacred geometry of the Vastu Purusha Mandala.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.