Teli ka Mandir: The Temple on Gwalior Fort with a Southern Roof

Indian temple architecture divides broadly into regional idioms, and Teli ka Mandir sits across the boundary between two of them.

The two main families:

• Nagara, the northern idiom, whose superstructure is a curving tower, the shikhara, over a square sanctum, crowned by a ribbed amalaka and a finial
• Dravida, the southern idiom, whose superstructure is a stepped pyramid of receding storeys crowned by a domed member

Within Dravida there is a further distinction by the shape of the crowning member. A square one is kuta, a circular one kosthaka, and an oblong barrel vaulted one is shala, also called the valabhi form, which is the wagon roof you see on south Indian gopurams.

What Teli ka Mandir does:

• The plan and the wall treatment belong to the northern tradition
• The roof is a shala, the oblong barrel vault, which belongs to the southern vocabulary
• The doorway and sculpture are north Indian in style
• The result is a building that no regional label fits cleanly

Why would anyone do this. Several explanations are offered, and they are not exclusive:

• The barrel vault is very old in India, older than either regional idiom. It derives from the shape of thatched and timber halls, and appears in the rock cut chaitya halls centuries earlier. Using it may be archaism rather than borrowing
• A rectangular sanctum requires an oblong roof. If the deity or the shrine's function needed that plan, the shala roof follows logically
• Gwalior sat on the routes between north and south, and craftsmen moved

The honest position is that the building is a deliberate combination whose reasons are not recorded, and that it demonstrates something worth remembering. The regional categories in the textbooks are ours. The builders were not confined by them.

Nobody is certain why the temple is called Teli ka Mandir, and the competing explanations are each worth knowing.

The explanations offered:

• From Telangana. That the craftsmen who built it, or the style they brought, came from the Telangana country, which would fit the southern roof. This is the explanation most often repeated
• From telis, the oil pressers. That the temple was built, endowed or maintained by the oil pressing community, whose guild would have had the means
• From taila, oil. That oil was used in some quantity here, either in lamps or in the building's treatment
• From a corruption of some earlier name now lost

Which is right. There is no inscription settling it, and the name is not attested from the temple's own period. It is a later usage that stuck.

What is worth noticing is the second explanation, whichever way the etymology falls. Temple building in India was not only royal. Merchant guilds, craft communities and groups of ordinary donors endowed a very large number of shrines, and inscriptions across the country record gifts from oil pressers, weavers, potters and traders alongside those from kings.

The idea that a community of oil pressers could have been associated with the tallest building on a royal fort is not far fetched at all. It is how much of Indian religious architecture actually got paid for.

The deity is a separate question from the name. The Garuda at the entrance and the doorway iconography point to Vishnu as the original dedication, though the shrine has been described at various times in connection with Shiva as well, and it is not in regular worship now.

The temple cannot be separated from the hill it stands on, and Gwalior fort has one of the more charming founding stories in north India.

The katha:

• A chief named Suraj Sen was suffering from a disease, generally given as leprosy
• On the hill he met a sage named Gwalipa, who gave him water from a pond on the plateau
• He was cured, and in gratitude he built a fort on the hill and named it after the sage
• The sage gave him the title Pal, and told him his line would hold the fort as long as they carried the name

The Suraj Kund, the pond of the story, is still on the fort, and the name Gwalior is traced to Gwalipa.

What the fort holds, besides Teli ka Mandir:

• The Sas Bahu temples, correctly Sahastrabahu, an eleventh century pair of Vishnu temples of the Kachchhapaghata period, with extraordinarily dense carving
• Man Singh Palace, the fifteenth century Tomar palace with its blue and yellow tiled exterior
• Gujari Mahal, built by Man Singh for his queen Mrignayani, now a museum
• The Siddhachal and Gopachal rock cut Jain colossi in the cliffs, some of them very large
• Suraj Kund and other tanks

And one inscription of world importance. In a small temple on the fort, dated to 876 CE, appears a written zero as a place value numeral in the numbers recorded in a land grant.

It is among the oldest securely dated inscriptions anywhere containing the zero in this form, which makes a hilltop in Madhya Pradesh one of the documented waypoints in the history of the number system the entire world now uses.

The temple standing today has been through a great deal, and what you see involves nineteenth century work as well as ninth century work.

What happened to it:

• The fort changed hands repeatedly over a thousand years, held by Tomars, Delhi sultans, Mughals, Marathas, the British and Scindia rulers
• During periods when the fort was a garrison, buildings on it were used for whatever the garrison needed, and the temple was reportedly put to non religious use at various times
• The structure lost much of its surface and some of its upper work
• A restoration was carried out in the nineteenth century under British administration, associated with Major Keith, which stabilised the building and rebuilt parts of it

How to look at a restored monument. This matters for how you read what you are seeing.

• Restoration of this era often involved conjectural rebuilding, where missing parts were replaced with what the restorer believed had been there
• That means some of what you see is a nineteenth century opinion about the ninth century
• It also means the building survives at all, which unrestored contemporaries frequently did not

The honest summary is that Teli ka Mandir is a genuine early medieval temple whose present appearance owes something to later hands, and that this is true of a large proportion of the monuments people photograph in India.

It is not a reason for disappointment. It is a reason to look carefully, and to notice that the history of a building includes what was done to keep it standing.

Getting there

• Gwalior fort, on the hill above Gwalior city, Madhya Pradesh
• Gwalior has an airport and a major railway station on the Delhi to Mumbai line, and is about 320 km from Delhi
• The fort is reached by road up the hill, or on foot by the Urwahi approach past the Jain colossi for those who want the walk
• Teli ka Mandir is inside the fort complex, a short walk from the Sas Bahu temples

When to go

• October to March. Gwalior is very hot from April to June and the fort plateau is exposed
• Morning for the light and the climb, late afternoon for the sound and light show in season
• Allow half a day for the fort as a whole, longer if you want the Jain rock carvings

What to see, in order

• Teli ka Mandir, looking at the roof from a distance first so the shape reads
• The Sas Bahu temples, whose interior carving is the finest on the fort
• Man Singh Palace, including the underground chambers
• The Jain colossi in the Urwahi and Gopachal cliffs
• Suraj Kund, the pond of the founding katha
• Gujari Mahal museum at the base

Practical notes

• Carry water. The plateau is long, open and hot
• Wear proper shoes. Distances on the fort are greater than they look on a map
• Ticketing covers the main monuments. Guides are available at the entrance
• Teli ka Mandir is not in regular worship, so it is visited as a monument

Combining the visit

• The Morena circuit, Mitaoli, Padavali and Bateshwar, is about 40 km away and makes a natural second day
• Orchha is roughly 120 km south by road, near Jhansi
• Datia and Shivpuri lie on the routes out of Gwalior

A closing thought. Most visitors to Gwalior fort remember the palaces and the Jain figures in the cliffs. Teli ka Mandir is the building worth stopping longest at, because it is the one that quietly refuses to be what the categories say it should be.