Setting the stage. For one glorious century starting just before the year 1000 Vikrama (A.D. 943), the political center of North India's Imperial formation¹¹ shifted from Kanauj in the Yamuna-Gangetic Doab (Mesopotamia), southwards to Khajuraho in the heavily-jungled uplands the Vindhyas. There, a succession of five Candella kings presided over the final, but also finest efflorescence of the NAgara-order temple, an architectural style whose origins are can be traced to Gupta-period prototypes in the same Bundelkand region,¹² and whose extinction as a vibrant creative tradition was perpetrated by iconoclastic Islam. Yet as Fate would have it (personified in the Zri-LakSmI consort of the Candella dynasty's brief Imperium),¹³ geographic remoteness insured the relatively intact survival of a dozen masterpieces of NAgara temple architecture at Khajuraho.¹⁴ Apparently, they escaped notice of even SultAn MahmUd himself, who lay futile siege to the impregnable Candella fortress at Kalanjar, not 50 miles away in AD 1022, on his 14th predation out of Ghazni, Afghanistan.¹⁵ It is true that in 1342 Ibn Battuta saw evidence of muslim mutilations, on the consecrated images at Khajuraho,¹⁶ and the largest Ziva-linga in North India, still in worship in the MAtangezvara, suffers the indignity of two Persian inscriptions.¹⁷ But otherwise, especially in their overwhelmingly figural outer fabrics [e.g., Plate 1], these temples survived centuries of neglect (following the final collapse of Candella power in 1308) with remarkable integrity, and soon after initial rediscovery by an Englishman in 1838,¹⁸ concerted efforts to restore them were undertaken, first by the local Chatarpur rajas, and since by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Returning to consideration of the site in the year 1000 Vikrama, it must have seemed a most propitious time for a hitherto insignificant tributary of the Imperial PratihAras to concretize dynastic aspirations for genuine sovereignty by the erection of a magnificent temple. As Ron Inden has noted in his brilliant reconstruction of the Deccan-based imperial formation of the Rashtrakutas,¹⁹ the grand finale of a tributary king's metamorphosis to overlordship in this period, equivalent to the cakravartin's horse sacrifice of earlier times, was often the construction of major temple. Unfortunately, the Candella's earliest royal temple dedication is lost--all but a roughly 1'4" square fragment of what must have been an approximately 2' x 5' slab.²⁰ Because the fragment was found near the VAmana, that temple may have been the one dedicated therein by the Candella king HarSadeva,²¹ presumably after wresting the fabled Kalanjar fortress²² back from the Rashtrakuta invader, Indra III and restoring his feudal liege MahIpAla to the PratihAra throne in Kanauj. However, since, atypically, its only overtly sexual imagery appears in unpublished subsidiary niches of the roof-pediments, ²³ it can receive no further comment here.

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