The temple that inspired the design of Parliament building in Delhi

This is the temple that inspired the British architects to construct the Parliament building in New Delhi.

While Delhi is easily accessible and the impressive Parliament building one of the most photographed monuments in India, the original circular structure has long been forgotten and it is consigned to pages of history.

Though the circular temple is a part of the tourist map, very few venture to see it, partly of its inaccessible location and partly because of  its setting in the dreaded Chambal Valley, the once infamous home of  dacoits.

The temple is just 40 kilometres away from Gwalior, one of the major cities of Madhya Pradesh. Gwalior is very well-connected by rail, road and rail networks.

This is the temple of Chausath Yogini in Garhi Mitawali. This is a temple of Shiva. It is situates atop a 100 feet hillock amid the Chambal Valley.

The Shiva temple is attached to a circular verandah which has 64 different rooms leading to a vast courtyard. When you first see the temple, you think it is a miniature Parliament. The architecture of both the Parliament building this Shiva temple resembles each other very closely.

While British architects-Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker- designed the Parliament building, this temple was designed by the Nag rulers of the area.

The Shiva temple inside the circular structure is also circular in shape. The temple is 170 feet tall. According to an inscription found here, the temple was constructed by Maharaja Deva Pala.It is also known as Ekattarso Mahadeva Temple.

Locals will tell you that Garhi Mitawali is part of the famous Golden Triangle of Chambal Valley which ahs more than 60 important archaeological ruins. Many of the temples are in varying stages of ruins. They belong to the Nag and Gupta rulers.  

The Golden Triangle, in ancient ages, housed a university which taught the tenets of Hinduism. A small town, Bateshwar, was the center of  university education. The students were housed in 100 different temples.

The circular temple of Mitawali  was believed to be the place where astrology and mathematics were taught. This was easy as the rays and shades of the Sun fell n the temple in distinct designs and patterns. By the way, there is a temple dedicated to the Sun god at Ainti village which is three kilometers from Mitawali. The students were housed at the temples of  Padavali and Kakanmath too.

Locals swear that the architecture of the Sun Temple at Padavali is much superior to that of the Sun temple at Khajurao. The only difference, they say, is that this village is much more inaccessible and unknown.

In this temple, the statues are housed outside the Sun shrine. This is also called Garhi or fortress. There are scores of carvings related to Rama, Krishna. Dashavatars of Hari, Shiva in dancing form or Nataraja and Mahabharata. They were built by the Guptas.

The beauty of these carvings is that they look like they have been executed a few years ago only and not centuries earlier. There are a few erotic images too.

Fifteen kilometers from Mitawali is Kutwar or Kuntidar, the native of Kunti-the mother of Pandavas. There are no sings of the ancient ruins here except a well which is believed to be more than 3,000 years old.  There is also a dam built by the Scindias who ruled the area with Gwalior as their capital.

Twenty kilometers from Kutwar is the village of Sehonia where houses the magnificent Kakanmath temple.

The temple is pyramidical in style and construction and the stones are kept in such a way that they form a pyramid. No cement or any their bonding materials has been used and this is a wonder in architecture.

The temple is believed to be more than one thousand years old. There are idols and statues of several Hindu God and Goddesses around the structure which rises majestically to a height of one hundred feet.

Sehonia is also a centre of Jain pilgrimage. You can visit all these places in the Chambal by basing yourself at Gwalior. All these places come under Morena district. There are more than 100 temples in the valley. Eminent historian and archaeologist Alexander Cunningham visited many of these temples and old cities and stayed in Gwalior for five years.   

Want to know more about the legendary dacoits such as Paan Singh Tomar and the beautiful temples. Take a private taxi and go around the Chambal and enjoy its natural beauty. They are a visual treat.

The Temple of Zero

I my previous article, I had written about my trip to Ujjain. In this post, I will detail my visit to Gwalior, which is one of the largest cities of Madhya Pradesh. Gwalior is just a couple of hours away from Bhopal where I had gone to attend an interview.

I travelled by Karnataka Express from Bhopal to Gwalior as it was convenient and I got the booking for it.

The city of Gwalior has several magnificent buildings, palaces forts and temples. It is also the place of the legendary singer Tansen and his master Haridas.

By the way, Haridas was a close disciple of Purandara Dasa and it is from Purandara that Haridasa learnt the basics of Carnatic music which he later went on to pass it on to Tansen.

Gwalior took my breath away but what interested me most was a small yet significant structure that has led mankind on the path of development. The structure is so old and the secret so well hidden that unless you know about it and request to see it, it escapes attention.

This structure is a small temple dedicated to Vishnu. As the Vishnu has four arms, it is called Chaturbhuja (four) temple. The face of Vishnu is defaced but the hands are still there.

This rock-cut temple is inside the famous Gwalior fort which arguably is one of the oldest surviving fort complexes in India. The temple stands on a monolithic stone. There are two other temples nearby-the Sas Bahu (mother-in-law and daughter-in-law) and Teli-ka-Mandir.  

What is impressive about the Chaturbhuj Temple is not the structure or the idol which is carved out of a single stone but a writing or inscription on a stone tablet near the deity. The stone inscription has the first ever recorded or written form of zero.

IN this inscription, zero is written as a dot. This is the first written representation of zero and it has continued to this day.

Zero is also called as Shunya in Sanskrit and it is in this temple that the world saw the figure of zero. Hence, mathematicians and astronomers also call the Chaturbhuj as the temple of Zero.

The tablet appears to be much older than the temple and it gives us the precise date (57 BC) on which the land was granted to the temple and the size of the daily offering of flowers to be made to Vishnu from the endowment.

Locals say the temple was built in 876 AD. The Gujarat Prathiharas built the temple. The Gwalior fort was built by Raja Man Singh in the 16th century.

By the way, the first text in which zero is mentioned is Lokavibhaga, a Jain text originally composed in Prakit by a Digambara monk called  Sarvanandi. Another book which has zero in a text is the Sanskrit version of compiled by one Simhasuri. It contains the oldest known mention of numeral  zero and also and the decimal system.

This text was discovered in 1909-1910.

The rules governing zero was for the first time in mankind enunciated by Brahmagupta in his magnum opus Brahmasputha Siddhanta written in 628 AD in Ujjain. In this book, Brahmagupta talks about zero and other negative numbers and also the algebraic rules for elementary arithmatic. One of  his rules say that zero plus zero is zero.  Another says zero divided by zero is zero and here Brahmagupta has assigned a value to zero.  

The Chaturbhuj temple in Gwalior is different from the temple with the same name in Orchha and Khajurao.

Orchha is 110 kms from Gwalior and it takes two hours to reach it. Khajurao is 227 kms away. Roads to both the places are good. Both these cities are in Madhya Pradesh.