Category:Nava Toran Temple

Nava Toran Temple 

An 11th century Hindu temple ruins
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Instance of	Hindu temple
Location	Neemuch district, Ujjain division, Madhya Pradesh, India
Heritage designation	Monument of National Importance
24° 35′ 34.8″ N, 74° 49′ 03″ E
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The Nava Toran Temple, sometimes spelled as the Nautoran temple or the Nava Torana temple, is an 11th century Hindu temple in Khor, Madhya Pradesh. It is notable as one of the few historic Hindu temples that have survived with many of the original toranas.

Toranas – literally, "arched doorway or gateway decorated with art" – are an ancient architectural element in Indian monuments. The earliest Hindu and Buddhist texts mention it as the gateway and feature of major towns and cities, forts, monasteries, stupas and temples. They marked the separation of two spaces, the outside from the inside of a designated site or territory. By about the 4th-century, they became quite elaborate, decorated with relevant artwork, often marking a separation of the mundane space from the spiritual space. They appeared with the doorway to garbhagriya (sanctums) and stupas. Later they appeared as the gateway to temples complex or mukha-mandapa. They would typically include Hindu iconography and reliefs of deity-legends featured in the sanctum.

The Nava Toran Temple – literally temple with "nine arched doorways" – stands on a platform. It has a square plan and three entrances. Each entrance leads to a passage to the mahamandapa. Each passage originally had two toranas emanating from the mouths of makaras (3x2 = 6 toranas). The mahamandapa leads to a sanctum, whose passageway had two more toranas. The sanctum doorway had one more torana, bringing the overall total to nine. At present the 18 makaras can be identified at the site. Six of the original toranas are structurally bound with steel strips to help preserve them. These are profusely carved, as are many other parts of temple interior. The artwork on both sides of each torana includes apsaras, defaced and damaged deities, yogis, yoginis and makaras. This artwork suggests that this may have been a yoga-inspired Shakta or Shiva temple.

The ceiling and sikhara of the temple are lost, making the extant site appear as a mere open mandapa. Some of the ruins of the original temple are at the site, and these suggest that this was more than an open mandapa. The broken sections on the top of the mandapa and broken structural components about load bearing pillars confirm that this was at some point a full temple. The center of the Nava Toran Temple has a damaged avatar of Vishnu – a small but profusely decorated Varaha statue. Inside the sanctum is a Shiva Linga. Both the Varaha and the Shiva Linga were recovered from this site's ruins and were placed during modern era restoration efforts. Given the diversity of icons here, the Nava Toran Temple was likely a larger multi-shrine complex before the 13th-century.