Akash Bhushan Dubey
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a historiographic synthesis of the evolution of temple architecture in Madhya Pradesh, tracing a continuous line of development from the earliest known structural shrine in the region , the apsidal Vāsudeva shrine at Besnagar, dated to the third–second century BCE (Bhandarkar, 1914-1915) , through the emergence of the Nāgara prototype under the Guptas, its stylistic elaboration under the Gurjara-Pratīhāras, and its culmination in the monumental Paramara-period temples at Udaipur and Bhojpur. While the individual segments of this trajectory have each received substantial scholarly attention (Brown, 1942; Kramrisch, 1946; Deva, 1969; Meister, 1983; Hardy, 2007), no existing publication draws them into a single continuous evolutionary account. Using a qualitative historiographic method based entirely on published excavation reports, epigraphic studies, and art-historical scholarship , without new fieldwork or measurement , this paper reconstructs that continuous arc and argues that it displays both marked continuity in core spatial vocabulary (the single-cell garbhagṛha, the maṇḍala-derived square plan) and marked rupture in material, scale, and superstructure form. The paper further argues that this trajectory of increasing ambition culminates, at the unfinished Bhojeshwar Temple, in a documented case where design intention outpaced constructional completion , a finding that motivates, but does not itself resolve, the fieldwork-based measurement study of the Paramara corpus that this paper is intended to contextualise.
Keywords: Nāgara architecture; Madhya Pradesh; Besnagar; Gupta temples; Gurjara-Pratīhāra architecture; Paramara temples; historiography; temple evolution.
