The northern Hindu temple: a small dark sanctum under a curvilinear tower (shikhara) crowned by a ribbed amalaka, its faces broken by projecting rathas, with halls in front rising like foothills to a mountain peak.
The free-standing stone temple appears in India in the Gupta period (fourth to sixth centuries AD). The earliest are small flat-roofed cells with a porch, like Temple 17 at Sanchi; by the early sixth century, at the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, the sanctum has a tower and sculptured panels on its walls. The essential idea never changed: the temple is the house of a god, whose image stands in a small, dark, square sanctum (the garbhagriha, or “womb-house”) at the centre of a squared diagram, and the tower above it is an image of the mountain on which the gods live.
In the north the tower took the form called nagara: a shikhara whose faces curve inward as they rise, divided horizontally into storeys (bhumis) and vertically into projecting bands (rathas) that continue the projections of the walls below, capped by a large ribbed disc (amalaka) and a water-pot finial (kalasha). The simplest, Latina, form has a single curving spire; the Sekhari form clusters smaller spires (urushringas) against the main one; the Bhumija form covers it with rows of miniature spires. The surfaces are woven with the gavaksha motif, the horseshoe window inherited from Buddhist architecture, multiplied into a honeycomb mesh.
Regional schools developed distinct accents. In Odisha the temples of Bhubaneswar (the Mukteshvara, and the Lingaraja of the 11th century) and the colossal Sun Temple at Konark (13th century, conceived as the chariot of the sun on stone wheels) separate the tower (deul) from a hall (jagamohana) with a stepped pyramidal roof. At Khajuraho the Chandella kings built, mostly between about 950 and 1050, some eighty-five temples, of which about twenty-five survive; the greatest, the Kandariya Mahadeva, stands on a high terrace, its porch, halls and vestibule rising in a continuous crescendo of roofs to a tower clustered with miniature spires, some 31 metres high. In Gujarat and Rajasthan the Solanki style produced the Sun Temple at Modhera and the marble Jain temples of Mount Abu.
The temple was built without mortar, of stone blocks held by weight and sometimes by iron clamps; the tower is solid or has a small corbelled chamber inside. The builders, guided by the vastu and shilpa treatises and by guild tradition, worked from a system of proportions based on the width of the sanctum. Northern temple-building was interrupted by the Islamic conquests of the thirteenth century, but continued in Rajasthan, Odisha and Nepal, and has revived in modern times.