The Age of the Imperial Guptas c8.11

c8.11

The great brick temple at Bhitargaon in the Cawnpore district lies twenty miles to the south of Cawnpore town. The temple was first described by Cunningham in 1875-76 and he assigned it to the Gupta period.¹ It was more accurately surveyed in recent times by Dr. J. Ph. Vogel, formerly a Superintendent of the Archæological Survey of India. Dr. Vogel states, “The outer ornamentation of terra cotta sculpture is certainly the most striking feature of the Bhitargaon temple (Plates IV and V). The walls rise in bold mouldings, their upper portions being decorated with a row of rectangular panels alternating with ornamental pilasters. It has been noticed above that the early plinth of the Nirvāṇa temple at Kasia is embellished in a very similar fashion and that on that account there is good reason to ascribe the Bhitargaon temple to the early Gupta period.”¹ The exterior walls of this temple were decorated with terra cotta panels in niches, proving that it did not belong to the type of the sancta at Bhumara or Nachna Kuthara. Moreover, there is a *Śikhara* in which there is a series of arches which are not exactly *Caitya*-windows.² The plinth mouldings are totally absent proving the difference between it and the temples at Nachna Kuthara and Bhumara.³ Therefore, its affinity lies more with the temple at Deogadh than with those of Nachna Kuthara and Bhumara because of the presence of the stumpy *Śikhara*.⁴ The art of the terra cotta panels of the Bhitargaon temple have been assigned to the Gupta period without sufficient reasons. A closer comparison with the products of the three great schools of Gupta Art in India e.g., Mathurā, Benares, and Pāṭaliputra prove that the terra cotta panels of Bhitargaon are later in date than the great Deogadh panels or the finer bas-reliefs of Sarnath. The mediaeval art of the United Provinces still remains to be studied. Sufficient remains of the periods of Bhoja I, Adivāraha and his son Mahendrapāla I, have been discovered all over the United Provinces but these scattered remains have not been analysed yet. Inscribed records of Bhoja I¹ on sculpture exist at Deogadh and Pehoa and some of Mahīpāla I at Asni in the Fatehpur district. At the same time the *Śikhara* of the Bhitargaon temple and its decorative motifs bear a curious resemblance to those of the temple of the Somavaṁśī kings in the Raipur district of the Central Provinces.²