Mitaoli: The Circular Yogini Temple on a Hill in Morena

The chambers were built to hold yoginis, and understanding them is the whole point of the building.

What the yoginis are:

• A group of female deities, most often counted as sixty four, associated with tantric traditions that developed from roughly the eighth century onward
• They are understood as emanations or attendants of the Devi, each with her own name, form, vahana and attributes
• Many carry animal heads or fierce features, and they are not domesticated goddesses of the household kind
• Their worship involved initiated practitioners and rites that were deliberately restricted

Why the temple is a circle. This is the striking part. A conventional temple concentrates attention at one end, on a single image in a dark sanctum. A yogini temple does the opposite.

• The images stand in a ring, all facing inward
• A worshipper in the courtyard is surrounded, with every deity in view at once
• The open sky above is part of the design, not a missing roof
• The central shrine holds Shiva or the Devi, so the circle has a focus without having an axis

The arrangement puts the practitioner inside the mandala rather than in front of it. That is a precise architectural statement of what these rites were understood to do.

At Mitaoli the yogini images themselves are largely gone, and most chambers now hold lingas. What survives is the plan, which is the part that carries the meaning.

Almost every article about Mitaoli repeats the same claim, and it deserves a straight answer rather than another repetition.

The claim. That the circular plan of Mitaoli was the model for the Parliament House in New Delhi, designed in the 1920s by Herbert Baker with Edwin Lutyens.

What supports it. A visual resemblance, and only that. Both are circular colonnaded buildings. The story is repeated widely, including on some signage and in a good deal of travel writing.

What is against it:

• There is no documentary evidence in the extensive surviving records of the Delhi project that Baker or Lutyens knew of Mitaoli or used it
• Circular colonnaded buildings were a standard European form long before, and the architects were working within a classical tradition that offers many closer models
• The Archaeological Survey of India and historians who have addressed the question have found no support for the claim
• The story appears to be relatively recent rather than contemporary with the building

Why it spread anyway. It is a satisfying story. It makes an obscure hilltop ruin in Morena the ancestor of the country's most photographed building, and it reverses the usual direction of influence.

What is worth saying is that Mitaoli does not need it. A circular open air temple of sixty four chambers built in 1323 is remarkable on its own terms, and the interesting question about it is what the yoginis were for, not whether an English architect once looked at a photograph.

Mitaoli belongs to a small group, and seeing where it sits in that group is the best way to understand it.

The surviving yogini temples of note:

• Hirapur, near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, small, circular and the best preserved, with most of its yogini images still in place
• Ranipur Jharial in Odisha, circular and open, on a rock outcrop
• Bheraghat near Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, the largest, circular, above the Narmada, with a later Shiva temple inserted at its centre
• Mitaoli in Morena, circular, on a hilltop
• Khajuraho, in Madhya Pradesh, which is rectangular rather than circular and is among the earliest

What the group has in common:

• Almost all are open to the sky
• Almost all are away from settlements, on hills, outcrops or riverbanks
• They are not large, and they were never meant to hold crowds
• Most lost their images, and the sculpture that survives is scattered across museums

What that pattern tells you. These were not public temples. A congregation temple is roofed, sits in a town and faces one way. A yogini temple sits apart, has no roof, and encloses whoever is inside it.

The siting and the losses go together. Traditions that restrict access leave few defenders when patronage ends, and shrines that stand alone on hills are easy to strip. That most of these buildings survive without their deities is not an accident of weather.

Mitaoli is not an isolated monument. It sits in one of the densest concentrations of early medieval temple building in north India, and going there for one temple is a waste of the journey.

What else is within a few kilometres:

• Padavali, a fortified enclosure holding the remains of a Shiva temple with exceptionally dense carving on its surviving mandapa, reached by steps through a gateway
• Bateshwar, a group of around two hundred small temples of the eighth to eleventh centuries, spread across a valley, which had collapsed into rubble and has been painstakingly reassembled by the Archaeological Survey over recent decades
• Naresar, a further group of small temples in a ravine
• The Chambal ravines themselves, which shaped the region's history and its long reputation for inaccessibility

The Bateshwar restoration deserves a mention on its own. Two hundred temples had fallen into heaps of numbered and unnumbered stone. Reassembling them meant sorting thousands of blocks and working out which belonged to which building, in a region that was, at the time the work began, not easy to work in.

It is one of the more impressive conservation efforts in India and almost nobody has heard of it.

Taken together, Padavali, Bateshwar, Naresar and Mitaoli make a full day and cover four different kinds of building from roughly the same broad period. Very few places in India offer that within a short drive.

Getting there

• Mitaoli village, Morena district, roughly 40 km from Gwalior
• A hired car from Gwalior is the practical arrangement, and the Morena circuit is usually done as a single day trip
• Gwalior has the nearest airport and a major railway station on the Delhi to Mumbai line
• The temple stands on a hill, reached by a flight of steps from the road

When to go

• October to March. The Chambal region is severely hot from April to June and the hilltop has no shade at all
• Morning, both for the climb and for the light across the circular courtyard
• Navratri brings local worship, though this is not a crowded shrine at any time

At the temple

• Walk the full ring of chambers rather than crossing the courtyard
• Look at the central shrine and the way the circle focuses on it without an axis
• Note the verandah pillars and the drainage of the open courtyard, which is carefully worked out
• The view from the hilltop over the surrounding country is part of why the site was chosen

Practical notes

• Carry water. There is nothing on the hill and little in the village
• The steps are exposed and can be slippery in rain
• The site is protected. Do not climb the walls or move stones
• There are few facilities. Plan food and fuel around Gwalior

Doing the circuit properly

• Padavali and Bateshwar are close together and are usually seen as a pair
• Naresar needs a short detour and a walk
• Allow a full day from Gwalior for all four, starting early

A closing thought. Indian temple architecture is usually described through its great axial monuments, the ones that lead you inward toward a single point. Mitaoli was built on the opposite principle, and standing in the middle of that ring is the clearest way to feel that the tradition had more than one idea about where a deity should be.