Chandela dynasty

The kingdom

The Chandelas rose as Gurjara-Pratihāra feudatories in the hill country of Bundelkhand and became independent in the tenth century. Their strength lay in the great hill forts — Kālañjara above all, which resisted repeated sieges and was regarded as among the strongest fortresses in India — and in a landscape of large artificial lakes their engineers built by damming valleys.

Vidyādhara, in the early eleventh century, is credited in the Muslim chronicles with fielding the largest army Mahmud of Ghazni encountered in India; Mahmud besieged Kālañjara twice and withdrew both times on terms.

Khajuraho

The Chandelas built some eighty-five temples at their original seat of Khajurāho between about 950 and 1050 CE, of which around twenty-five survive. They are Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava and Jain, built to a common plan — a high plinth, a soaring tower over the sanctum, a sequence of halls before it — and covered inside and out with sculpture.

The erotic sculpture that made the site famous in the modern period occupies only a small proportion of the whole and is concentrated on particular bands of the outer walls. Its purpose has been explained as tantric, as auspicious, as a depiction of the world of desire outside the sanctum, and as several other things; no explanation is agreed, and the frequency with which the site is reduced to this one feature distorts what is a comprehensive statement of the north Indian temple at its height.

The site was abandoned as a political centre and largely forgotten, which is why so much of it survives. It was reported to European attention in 1838 by T. S. Burt, a British engineer.

End

Prithvīrāja Chāhamāna defeated the Chandelas in 1182 and the dynasty never fully recovered. Qutb al-Din Aibak took Kālañjara in 1202, and after a partial revival the Chandelas were finally reduced in the fourteenth century. Their memory persisted in Bundelkhand's bardic tradition, particularly in the Ālhā, a cycle of heroic ballads about two Chandela warriors that is still sung.