The Gop Temple: The Oldest Standing Temple in Gujarat

The stepped roof is the reason architectural historians care about this building, and it is worth understanding what it represents.

What the roof is:

• Two receding tiers of large slabs, forming a stepped pyramid over the square sanctum
• The tiers carry chaitya window motifs, the horseshoe arch shape borrowed from the facades of earlier rock cut halls
• The form is a phamsana, the general term for a pyramidal tiered roof, as opposed to the curving shikhara of mature north Indian temples

Why this matters. Indian temple architecture had to be invented, and the sixth century is roughly when the inventing was happening.

• The earliest shrines were flat roofed cells, small square rooms with a porch
• Builders then began raising something above the sanctum to mark it, and experimented with how
• Stepped pyramids were one answer, and became the basis of the southern Dravida vimana
• Curving towers were another, and became the northern Nagara shikhara
• The barrel vault was a third, surviving in the shala form

Gop sits at the point where these possibilities were still open. Its roof is not yet a Nagara shikhara and not a Dravida vimana. It is an early solution, in a form that in Gujarat did not become the mainstream.

The chaitya window detail tells the same story. That motif comes from the facades of rock cut halls, where it was a real opening admitting light. By Gop's time it had become an ornamental unit, repeated across a surface, and it goes on being used decoratively for the next thousand years across India.

A form that starts as a window and ends as a pattern is a good illustration of how architectural vocabulary actually develops, and Gop is early enough to show the transition still in progress.

Gop is not entirely alone. It gives its name to a group of early temples scattered across Saurashtra, and the group as a whole is what tells the story.

What the group is:

• A set of small early temples across the Saurashtra peninsula, generally placed between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries
• They share a plain treatment, small scale, high plinths and distinctive roof forms
• Gop is the best known and is used as the type site, so the whole group is often called the Gop group or the early Saurashtra group
• Other examples are scattered across Junagadh, Porbandar, Jamnagar and Devbhumi Dwarka districts, many of them in obscure locations

Why Saurashtra:

• The Maitrakas ruled here from Valabhi from around the fifth to the eighth centuries, and this was a stable and prosperous state with maritime trade
• Saurashtra's ports connected it to the wider Indian Ocean, and the region was wealthy
• There was, in short, both the money and the peace to build

What happened afterwards. The Maitraka state ended, and the region's temple building later resumed on a completely different scale and in a different idiom under the Solankis, from the tenth century onward.

That is why the gap feels so strange when you visit. Gujarat has a set of very small, very early temples, then a long thin period, then an explosion of enormous and elaborate building four hundred years later.

The early group is easy to overlook because it is modest, remote and mostly not in worship. But without it there is no way to see where the later work came from, and a visitor who has been to Gop reads Modhera differently.

One of the honest difficulties with Gop is that nobody can say with confidence which deity it was built for.

Why the question is open:

• The image is gone, as it is at almost every abandoned early shrine
• There is no inscription at the site identifying the dedication
• The sculpture that would ordinarily indicate the deity, on doorframes and niches, is largely lost or too worn to read
• The temple has not been in continuous worship, so there is no living tradition to consult

What has been suggested. Proposals have included Surya and Vishnu, on the basis of comparisons with other early temples and readings of what remains, but the matter is not settled.

Why this happens so often with early temples. It is worth understanding, because visitors find it frustrating.

• Early images were often of less durable material, or were portable, and did not survive abandonment
• A shrine that fell out of use lost the community that knew what it was for within a few generations
• Later occupants sometimes reused such buildings for other purposes
• Inscriptions were not universal, and many temples never carried one

What can be said. The building tells you a great deal even without the deity. Its plan, proportions, roof and mouldings place it firmly in a period and a regional tradition, and those things are legible to anyone who knows the vocabulary.

That is the useful way to look at it. Gop is a document about how people built, at a moment when they were still deciding what a temple should look like. The question of which name they used inside it, for once, is not the most interesting thing about it.

The country around Gop holds more than most visitors realise, and a trip out here should not be for one small building.

Ghumli, in the Barda hills nearby:

• Once the capital of the Jethwa rulers of this region
• The Navlakha temple, a very large Solanki period temple of around the twelfth century, standing on a high plinth with extensive carving
• The Vikia Vav and Jhinjhari Vav, stepwells of considerable scale and quality
• Ruins, gateways and remains spread across the hillside

The contrast between Gop and Ghumli is the reason to see them together. Gop is sixth century, small, plain and experimental. Ghumli is twelfth century, enormous, elaborate and confident. They are a short drive apart, and the six hundred years between them is visible in the stone.

The Barda hills themselves are a wildlife sanctuary, a low range of dry deciduous forest, and the drive through them is pleasant in the cooler months.

Other things on this coast:

• Porbandar, on the sea, with its old quarter and its associations with the birth of Gandhi
• Harshad Mata temple at Miyani on the coast, and the Barda coastline generally
• Dwarka and Beyt Dwarka further north along the coast
• Junagadh and Girnar to the southeast, a full destination in themselves

What this stretch of Gujarat offers is a set of sites that almost nobody visits in sequence. Most itineraries take Dwarka and Somnath and skip everything in between, which leaves the entire early history of Gujarat's temple architecture off the map.

Getting there

• Near Bhanvad, in the Barda hills country of Saurashtra, Gujarat
• Roughly 70 km from Porbandar and about 100 km from Jamnagar, by road
• Porbandar and Jamnagar both have airports and railway stations
• The site is on a low rise off a rural road. A car with a driver who knows the area is the practical choice, and asking locally may be necessary

When to go

• October to March. Saurashtra is very hot from April to June and there is no shade at the site
• Morning or late afternoon, for raking light on the roof tiers, which is when the chaitya window motifs read clearly
• The monsoon greens the country and makes the drive attractive, but rural roads suffer

What to expect

• A small building and no facilities. There is no ticket office, no interpretation and often nobody there
• It is a protected monument and not in worship, so this is a visit to an archaeological site rather than a shrine
• Twenty to thirty minutes is enough at the temple itself, unless you are studying it

Practical notes

• Carry water. There is nothing at the site
• Wear shoes with grip. The plinth and approach are uneven
• Do not climb on the structure. The slabs are ancient and the roof is the whole point of the building
• Take nothing from the site, including loose fragments
• Mobile coverage can be patchy

Doing it properly

• Pair it with Ghumli and the Navlakha temple, which is the single best reason to make this trip. The two together cover six hundred years
• The stepwells at Ghumli are worth as much time as the temple
• Porbandar makes a comfortable base for the area

A closing thought. It is a very Indian situation that the oldest surviving temple in a state famous for its temples sits unattended on a rise in the middle of farmland, with no signboard worth the name, while coaches queue at the monuments built six centuries later. If you have any interest in how the tradition got started, this small stone box is worth more of your time than most of them.