Khajuraho

The temples were built by the Chandela dynasty, a Rajput house that rose in Bundelkhand in the ninth century and made Khajuraho its religious centre while with strongholds at the hill forts of Kalinjar and Ajaigarh. Most of the surviving buildings went up between about 885 and 1050, under rulers including Yashovarman, who built the Lakshmana temple, and Vidyadhara, credited with the Kandariya Mahadeva. Medieval accounts describe a far larger group, of which around twenty to twenty-five temples remain.

Building stopped as Chandela power declined and the region came under the Delhi Sultanate. The site was never systematically destroyed, but the town shrank to a village, the forest closed in, and worship at most of the temples ended. The fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta passed by and recorded the temples, then they largely dropped out of written record for centuries, maintained only where local people kept a shrine in use.

In 1838 a British engineer, T. S. Burt, was led to the ruins by his bearers and sent a description to the Asiatic Society; Alexander Cunningham surveyed and catalogued them in the following decades, dividing them into the Western, Eastern and Southern groups still used today. Clearance and conservation followed under the Archaeological Survey of India. The group was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, an airport opened to bring visitors directly, and a village of a few thousand people grew into a small town living from tourism, and an annual dance festival became its main cultural event.

Khajuraho's reputation rests on its sculpture, and the carving is far broader than the erotic panels that made it famous. The temple walls carry gods and attendant deities, mythical beasts, musicians and dancers, and long friezes of processions, battles and domestic scenes, with apsaras — celestial women shown writing, playing, dressing and dancing — the most frequent subjects. The erotic figures, often placed on the junctions between hall and sanctuary, are a minority of the total, and scholars still disagree about what they meant to their makers; the temples show Hindu and Jain patronage side by side, a tolerance unusual enough to be worth noting.

The living culture is Bundelkhandi. Bundeli, a dialect of Hindi, is spoken in the villages, and the folk traditions of the region include the Alha, a sung epic of Chandela-era warriors still performed at fairs, and Badhai and Rai dances at weddings and festivals. The dance festival each February gives the town a week of Indian classical performance in front of the temples and has become its main cultural event.

Village life close to the temple park keeps the rhythms of a farming district: weekly markets, cattle in the lanes, temple fairs at Shivaratri, and weddings concentrated in the winter months. Visitors are a constant presence, and the town has learned to live from them, which shows both in good English among guides and shopkeepers and in a fairly hard sell around the temple gates.

About 24,000 people live in the town, which is an unusual place: a rural Bundelkhand settlement with an international airport and a concentration of hotels that would suit a much larger city. Tourism is the economy — hotels, restaurants, guides, drivers, souvenir and stone-carving shops — and it is strongly seasonal, filling from October to March and emptying in the summer, when many workers take other jobs or leave for the cities. Farming continues around the town, with wheat, pulses and oilseeds on the black soil and grazing on the stony margins.

Chhatarpur district, to which Khajuraho belongs, is among the poorer parts of Madhya Pradesh, and the surrounding Bundelkhand region has a long history of drought, water shortage and migration for work to Delhi and the industrial cities. Government schemes, the national park and the tourism trade provide much of the cash income. Schools, banks and the main hospital are in the town or at Chhatarpur, about 45 kilometres away.

The day is ordered by the light. Visitors go to the temples early and again in the late afternoon; the middle of the day is quiet, with shops shuttered against the heat. Evenings bring a sound-and-light show at the Western Group and a slow circuit of the main road, where the hotel terraces, craft shops and tea stalls stay open until the tour buses have gone.

Eating in Khajuraho divides between the visitor restaurants on the main road and the plain Bundelkhandi cooking of the village. The regional staple is wheat, eaten as chapati or as bafla — dough balls boiled and then baked or roasted, split and soaked in ghee, served with dal and a garlic or coriander chutney, the local version of Rajasthan's dal baati. Alongside it come kadhi, a yoghurt and gram-flour curry, seasonal vegetables such as pumpkin and gourds, and rice in smaller quantities than further east.

Breakfast is the Madhya Pradesh standard of poha, flattened rice steamed with onion, green chilli and turmeric and scattered with crisp sev and coriander, often eaten with hot jalebi and sweet milky tea. Snacks lean on gram flour: samosas, kachoris, pakoras and bhutte ka kees, grated maize cooked in milk with spices, which appears when the corn is in. Sweet shops sell milk-based mawa sweets, and peda and barfi are bought for temple offerings and weddings.

The restaurants around the Western Group serve a wider menu shaped by decades of foreign visitors — paneer and chicken curries, tandoori dishes, pizza, pasta and pancakes — and most have rooftops that look towards the temple spires. Alcohol is served in hotels and a few restaurants but is not part of everyday local life, and many village households are vegetarian.