Travels into India’s enigmatic past
Live Mint“I have seen the world, dream king. About an hour’s drive from the state capital of Raipur, these days, Sirpur is both a sleepy small town, and also one gigantic archaeological site. In late medieval times, Udaipur was the capital of the Manikya kingdom; the temples constructed by successive generations of the Manikyas—who ruled the region from roughly the 15th century CE till 1949—are classics of concurrent Bengali styles of temple architecture, but also influenced by Tripura’s rich Buddhist past and Sufi tradition. When the Alchi temple complex was built, commissioned by two wealthy nobles of the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge, the Mahayana and Vajrayana were thriving in Kashmir, part of a South Asia-wide Buddhist cultural landscape that included Nepal, Bangladesh, northern Pakistan, and modern Indian states of Bihar, Bengal, Odisha, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. Maitreya’s dhoti features miniatures featuring the life of the Buddha, while Manjushri’s dhoti depicts the 84 Mahasiddhas, or supreme tantric adepts, venerated in both Buddhist and Saiva trantric lineages.
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