heritage/deogarh.jpg · 1200×800Deogarh stands on a cliff above the Betwa in Lalitpur district, where the river cuts through low hills. The hill carried a fort long before it carried temples, and the Gupta-period Dashavatara temple below it dates to about 500 CE. Jain building on the fort begins under the Gurjara-Pratiharas — a pillar inscription beside the Shantinatha temple is dated Shaka 784, that is 862 CE, in the reign of Bhojadeva — and continues under the Chandelas, who took the fort in 1097 CE.
Counts of the temples differ — thirty-one in most listings, more than forty if every small shrine and ruin is included — and they were raised between roughly the eighth and the seventeenth centuries, many of them out of the stone of older ones. Together they hold around two thousand carved images of Tirthankaras, yakshas and yakshis. Temple 12, dedicated to Shantinatha, is the principal one, with an image about twelve feet high.
A manastambha near the Shantinatha temple carries all twenty-four Tirthankaras with their emblems, and hundreds of loose panels are set into the compound walls — so many that scholars suppose a workshop of sculptors worked here for generations. Inscriptions run from the eighth century to the fifteenth, with later ones in the cave called Siddha-ki-gufa. The temples were damaged in the medieval centuries; the Jain community has cared for them since 1939, and the Archaeological Survey protects the site and keeps a small museum.
