Nachna Temples – History
The early history of the site is
not known. Cunningham, in his first publication, mentioned that the way to the
site was full of ruins and partially bricked monuments, except for the two
stone temples with stone reliefs at the site were in remarkably well-preserved
condition. Cunningham called it the Nachna-Kuthara temples in Volume 21 report
of the Archaeological Survey of India, deriving it from the name of the
district and another village in the region. The site is deep inside a forest
territory, at the entrance of a difficult to traverse valley within the Vindhya
mountains. This, speculated Cunningham, may have contributed to the temple's
survival during the Muslim invasion of this region.
According to him, regional
people knew about these temples, visited them and thought that Nacchna-Kuthara
was an ancient capital city of the Bundelkhand region. Other findings suggest
that the site has attracted significant numbers of pilgrims for centuries, and
up to the present day. After Cunningham's visit, the upper cella of the Parvati
temple collapsed, and it was later reconstructed. The site originally had not
yielded any inscriptions in its immediate vicinity, but later two rock
inscriptions were found at Nachna site of Ganj. These have been dated to the
470 – 490 CE period, attributed to Vyaghradeva who inscribes his allegiance to
the Vakataka king
Prithvisena.
One theory identifies
Vyaghradeva with the Uchchha Kalpa king Vyaghra, but this identification
is disputed. Nevertheless, the discovery confirms that Nachna region was
geo-politically important in the 5th century, and it politically
links this region to an era when Ajanta
Caves were also being built. The artists who built the
Aurangabad Buddhist Caves and the Nachna Hindu temples may have come from the
same school because the "visual and design elements of cave 3 at
Aurangabad display surprising similarities with images and ornamental
patterns", particularly when compares the sculpture on Parvati temple's
window to those in Aurangabad.
The two temples of significance
at Nachna site are the Parvati temple built earlier and the
Chaumukhnath Mahadeva (Shiva) Temple probably built centuries later. The Chaumukhnath
temple shows signs of additions and reconstruction in later centuries which
makes it difficult to place it chronologically. The region has yielded
many ruins in the form of foundation remains, sculpture and decorative parts.
Most scholars place the Parvati
Nachna temple in the Gupta Empire era, more specifically
the second half of the 5th century. The Chaumukhanatha temple
is generally placed in the 9th century, or at least few
centuries after the stone temple dedicated to goddess Parvati. For example,
Cunningham's original estimate in 1885 for the Chaumukhanatha temple was 600 to
700 CE, in contrast to his estimate of 400 CE for the Parvati temple.
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