Khajuraho Group of Monuments
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How it came to be
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments is a set of Hindu and Jain temples in Madhya Pradesh in central India. They were built by the Chandela dynasty, which ruled the region in the 10th and 11th centuries and reached its height between about 950 and 1050. The Lakshmana Temple stands for the reign of Yashovarman and the Vishvanatha Temple for that of Dhanga, while the largest surviving temple, Kandariya Mahadeva, was built under King Vidyadhara.
By the 12th century there are said to have been about 85 temples. In 1022 the Persian scholar Al-Biruni, who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni's raid on Kalinjar, named Khajuraho as the capital of Jajahuti. Around 1335 the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta came to the place he called Kajarra and described mutilated idols and yogis living near the temples.
The temples were later overgrown by jungle. In the mid-19th century Alexander Cunningham surveyed them and divided them into Western, Eastern and Southern groups, a division still in use. The surviving temples are spread over about 6 km², and they were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1986.
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