About 1,300 years ago, powerful kings Yashovarman and Lalitaditya ruled north India. Lalitaditya, a Vishnu worshipper, governed from Kashmir, while Yashovarman ruled Kannauj and was devoted to Shiva. Lalitaditya favored sloping roofs for temples, while Yashovarman preferred curving spires, known as the 'Nagara' style. Their desire to dominate led to the concept of mastering the "four corners of the world." This rivalry echoes in Angkor Wat, the colossal monument in Cambodia, potentially influenced by India's temple styles, exemplified by Masrur's unfinished temple in Himachal Pradesh.
Courtesy Abhilash Gaur
About 1,300 years ago, there were two powerful kings in north India: Yashovarman and Lalitaditya. Lalitaditya ruled over the hills from Kashmir; Yashovarman over the northern plains from Kannauj. Lalitaditya worshipped Vishnu; Yashovarman was a devotee of Shiva. Lalitaditya patronised temples with sloping, pyramid-like roofs, Yashovarman preferred curving temple spires, now known as the ʻNagaraʼ style. And both Yashovarman and Lalitaditya thought they were better than the other. They wanted to become masters of the “four corners of the world”.
What does their story have to do with Cambodiaʼs Angkor Wat, the worldʼs “largest religious monument )” which is as big as 227 football fields? And what does Angkor have to do with Masrur, a small, ruined temple carved out of one rock in Himachal Pradeshʼs Kangra district?
Where did the idea for Angkor Wat arise?
Elephants, oak trees, empires, social networks…all big things start small. Angkor Wat and the other ʻtemple-mountainsʼ of Cambodia must have had a smaller precursor too.
The term ʻtemple-mountainʼ is apt because these temples, besides being enormous, represented the Himalayas conceptually. The biggest spire over the temple sanctum indicated Mount Meru, the home of Hindu gods, and because mountains donʼt exist alone, the surrounding spires conveyed the idea of a mountain range.
Angkor Vat Hindu-Buddhist temple complex near Siem Reap, Cambodia
Archaeologists say the temple-mountains of Cambodia had been evolving for almost 400 years by the time the Khmer king Suryavarman II built Angkor Wat. They have identified a small brick temple called Ak Yum, about 11km away from Angkor Wat, as the earliest example of this style in Cambodia.
So the question is, did this style originate in Cambodia or did it arrive from India, just as Hinduism had some centuries earlier?
It was very different from Indian temples
India, especially south India, had its own large temples, but they invariably had one towering spire. If the temple was small, its door led directly into the sanctum; if it was large, you walked through a long hall or corridor.
But in Cambodiaʼs temple-mountains, the sanctum stood at the intersection of two axes. There were four doors in the four directions, so one axis ran north-south, and the other east-west. It was possible to approach the sanctum from all four sides.
Western archaeologists unsuccessfully searched for such a temple in India from the pre-Angkor period and concluded that it had not been built here. But at least one ancient treatise on temple construction mentioned this layout. It was part of the Vishnudharmottara Purana and mentioned dozens of temple types, including one called ʻKailasaʼ that had one sanctum, four doors, four mandapas (forecourts outside the sanctum) and five spires. The main spire capped the sanctum and four smaller ones capped the mandapas.
The ʻKailasaʼ temple style matched Cambodiaʼs temple-mountains, and since the Vishnudharmottara Purana is believed to have been written between 400CE and 500CE, this temple style was known in India long before Angkot Watʼs prototype Ak Yum was built.
It was hiding in plain sight at Masrur
Actually, work on a ʻKailasaʼ temple had started on a hilltop in India before Ak Yum was built, but it was never finished, and then earthquakes, wind and rain took a toll on the structure, so that even when archaeologists saw it they didnʼt realise what it was until an American expert named Michael Meister chanced upon it 20 years ago.
Earthquakes, especially the 7.8-magnitude Kangra quake of 1905, have taken a heavy toll on the Masrur temple’s structure
Meister is a specialist in the art of India and Pakistan at the University of Pennsylvania. According to his CV, “his research and writing focuses on temple architecture”. Meister and some of his students visited Masrur twice in 2004. Their object was to study the ruins of the hilltop rock temple that had been known to Westerners for about 100 years.
By the time an Archaeological Survey of India official named Harold Hargreaves visited Masrur in October 1913, only the 160-foot north-south axis of the temple survived. The western side, which overlooked the Beas river and would have served as the templeʼs rear entrance, had collapsed completely. The roof of the eastern wing had also fallen.
The temple’s western side had collapsed completely
With its multiple spires, Masrur looked like a cluster of unfinished shrines to Hargreaves, and that has been ASIʼs view ever since. The heritage bodyʼs ʻInventory of Monuments and Sites of National Importanceʼ lists Masrur as “Rockcut temples with sculptures...A most remarkable temple group...a series of monolithic temples”.
Walls of the Masrur temple are richly carved
At different points, experts have counted anywhere from seven to fifteen “temples” at Masrur, relying on the number of spires. But Meister, who had edited the eight-volume ʻEncyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architectureʼ did not count the spires.
He noted excavations at the north and south ends of the rock, suggesting that the architect had intended to provide doorways on both sides. Also, while the ceiling of the sanctum was richly carved, the walls had been left plain, suggesting that the architect intended to dig through them to create passages linking with the doorways on the north and the south.
Carved ceiling outside Masrur’s sanctum
At one point, it seemed like Masrur might have been designed as a temple with one sanctum and three doorways, like the fifth-century Jogeshwari cave temple in Mumbai. But then, Meister found “remnants of wall ornament surviving on the west that can be matched to the better preserved east facade”. At that moment it became clear to him that Masrur was a cross-axial temple like Angkor Wat and the temple-mountains of Cambodia.
Was it older than Cambodiaʼs oldest temple-mountain?
ASI had loosely dated the Masrur “temples” to 8th-9th centuries. Meister needed a more precise date to establish whether Masrur was older than Cambodiaʼs templemountains, and whether the design had travelled there from India, or the other way.
He noticed that the stone carvings at Masrur resembled the ornamentation at the Chhatrari temple between Chamba and Bharmour in Himachal Pradesh. That temple had been precisely dated to the early 8th century, thanks to a bronze inscription by a local king named Meruvarman. Some of the carvings at Masrur were also similar to those seen in 7th-century Nagara temples “from Mahua in Madhya Pradesh to Alampur in Andhra Pradesh (now in Telangana), that disappeared in middle India by late in the 8th century”. So, it could be inferred that the Masrur temple had been built no later than the middle of the 8th century.
Meister placed Masrurʼs construction between 724CE and 760CE. This estimate positioned it uncomfortably close to the Ak Yum temple, but Meister finally decided that architectural inspiration for temple-mountains had flowed from India to Cambodia because “the varied, complex and beautifully suggestive plan (of Masrur) far exceeds for its time the tentative contemporaneous explorations of a temple-mountain type found in Cambodia.”
He also refined his estimate of what the Masrur temple would have looked like had it been completed. There would have been 19 spires: one above the sanctum, one each above the four pillared halls or mandapas, one each above the four stairways leading to the roof, plus two each above the four gateways opening to the north, south, east and west. The last two spires would have capped the two small and separate shrines on the east.
According to Meister, this is what the finished Masrur temple would have looked like from the top with its 19 spires
Do we know who built the Masrur temple?
If you visit Masrur, you will see that even in its ruined state it is a very complex and ambitious project, and beyond the means of a minor hill raja or chieftain. Only a powerful king with enormous wealth could have initiated it. But who?
We know there were two powerful kings in the north at that time: Lalitaditya (724- 760 CE) and Yashovarman (725-754 CE). Being closer to Kashmir, Masrur lay within Lalitadityaʼs zone of influence. But remember, Lalitaditya was a Vishnu devotee. Masrur, although now used as a Vishnu temple, was originally a Shiva shrine. Both Hargreaves and Meister inclined to this view because of the Shiva image carved “at the centre over the sanctum doorway”.
On the other hand, Yashovarman — Lalitadityaʼs “rival for territory and fame” — was a Shaivite king. And the spires of Masrur were carved in the Nagara style that had evolved in the plains of central India rather than the pyramidal style of Lalitadityaʼs Kashmir.
It was possible then that Yashovarman had extended his empire into the hills and commenced construction of a ʻKailasaʼ temple at Masrur that a “king of kings is supposed to build after his conquest of the Earth”. In fact, his court poet Vakpatiraja wrote a poem titled Gaudavaho that says Yashovarman “ended his tour of royal conquest of the four directions (digvijaya) by going north”. From Kannauj, he came to Ayodhya, and then entered the hills.
Further up from Kangra, there were Varman kings in Chamba, on the border of modern J&K. Meister says they might have been an offshoot of Yashovarmanʼs dynasty in Kannauj, and they were certainly building Nagara-style temples in Bharmour.
Nagara-style spire of an ancient temple at Bharmour in Himachal’s Chamba district
Photos: Abhilash Gaur
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