Nachna Temples – History

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 5^th 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 5^th century. The Chaumukhanatha temple is generally placed in the 9^th 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.