Tigawa Temples – History

Tigawa Temples – History

The site is located on a plateau near the Kaimur range of hills, with belts of rocks, where ancient Indians used the local geology to build numerous small dams to harvest rainwater into water reservoirs that locals call jhils. These reservoirs extend from Bahuriband to the north of Tigawa. The local tradition is that there was in the distant past a large city in that location, which would explain the numerous mounds found in their region and when excavated, these mounds have yielded broken pottery and bricks.

Alexander Cunningham speculated in 1879 that the Bahuriband (also Bahulaband, about 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) south of Tigawa) may have been the city that Ptolemy transliterated as Tholabana. The name Tigawa (Tigowa, Tigoan, Tigwan) may be derived from "Tri-gawa" or "three villages", referring to the neighboring villages of Amgowa and Deori. Local tradition believes that it once had a fort and it was part of a major town named Jhanjhangarh, a suburb of ancient Bahuriband.

Alexander Cunningham visited Tigawa in 1873 and reported the antiquities of the town. He mentions a rectangular mound of 250 feet long and 120 feet wide which was entirely covered with large blocks of cut-stones. These stones were parts of ruins of various temples, all fallen ace but one which was in good state of preservation. He was told that the mound was utterly destroyed by a railway contractor who collected all the squared stones in a heap together to be used in railway construction. It is mentioned that two hundred carts were used to bring this heap to the foot of hill. The local villagers submitted a petition to the British official in Jabalpur, to stop the desecration. This rapacious and destructive activity was stopped by an order from the Deputy Commissioner of Jabalpur, but damage was done till that time.

Cunningham estimated that the temple would have been about 19.5 feet square. One stone temple that was too big for the railway project remained untouched, which locals call the Kankali Devi Temple and further scholarship identified it to be one of the oldest Hindu temples of the Gupta era. An upset Alexander Cunningham wrote, "to the railway contractor the finest temple is only a heap of ready squared stones", and "the temple of Jerusalem, a ready quarry is to him, and it is nothing more".

The Tigawa is generally dated to the early 5^th century, though some scholars have dated it to other periods. After comparing it to the hundreds of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain monuments he had seen during his tours, Cunningham argued based on stylistic grounds, iconography, and architecture, that the original Tigawa temple undoubtedly belongs to the Gupta period, and cannot, therefore, be later than the fifth century A.D.; but it is more probably as old as the third century".

He counted basements of at least thirty-six temples on this mound. The temples were in varying sizes from 4 feet square to 15 feet square. The temples of modest size, 4 to 6 feet square, were covered on three sides and open on east. Temples of medium size, 7 to 10 feet square, were covered on all sides with a doorway on the eastern sides, whereas the large temples, from 10 to 15 feet square, were having an additional portico in front. All these temple, which ruins are only left, were having a shikhara with amalaka on top. No Buddhist or Jaina antiquity was found by Cunningham.

In 1957, Mate narrowed the estimate for the Tigawa temple to fourth or fifth century, along with those for Udayagiri and Sanchi. Percy Brown, in 1959, estimated that the Udayagiri is older, adding that the Sanchi and Tigawa temples were probably completed between 400 and 450 CE. Later scholarship has largely placed the Tigawa temple in the early 5^th century, or 400-425 CE range.

It may assumed that the religious activity witnessed a tremendous growth at Tigawa after the construction of the first temple, which is the same one which is standing at present as well. That earliest temple is dated to the Gupta period; hence all the other temples would have been built after this one only. It may be also assumed that after the disintegration of the Gupta empire, rulers of small kingdoms were forced to focus over a small region for all their activities and Tigawa was one such center. It would be hard to say in which time all these additional shrines were constructed however as the region was under influence of the Kalchuris for a long period, these activities may be assigned to them.