The first thing you notice about these temples is what surrounds them. Victorian lawns, symmetrical fountains that recall Mughal pleasure gardens, a lotus pond shaped like the flower but with no blooms in it. There are no fruit-bearing trees that can attract monkeys, birds and insects; no flowering trees that can attract snakes. At the centre, beneath a cluster of white marble or pink sandstone peaks, stands the temple, with fluttering flags. In the 20th century, they rose not just in India, but also in London, in Dubai, in American cities. They make very specific statements about aspirational Hindus.
Marble has never been a traditional material in Hindu sacred architecture. In Tamil Nadu, the great storied temples were built in granite. In Odisha, the material was khondalite. In Karnataka, soapstone. Across North India, red and yellow sandstone. Marble was, in fact, long associated with animal bones and was deliberately shunned by traditional artisans.
White of piety
It is the Shvetambara Jain community of merchants who first built temples of marble, on Mount Abu and Girnar in Gujarat, from the 10th century onwards, during the reign of the Solanki kings. As followers of white-robed teachers, building temples of white marble seemed fairly logical. Marble images within were bedecked with inlay, gold and gems.
When Islam rose in India, marble became a popular export, used for tombstones and to make the mihrab niche on the qibla wall of mosques, pointing to Mecca. Many Muslim Sultanates had Jains as their treasurers and mint-masters. Marble soon became a luxury material for kings. For Sufi saints, white embodied simplicity and piety.
In Orchha in Madhya Pradesh, older Hindu temples were made of sandstone. Only in the last hundred years did Hindu traders from the Aravalli regions, where marble is abundant, start mimicking their Jain rivals. This gave rise to the Jaipur style. First popularised by the Birla family, it is now carried forward by the Sompura architects who work with both the Swaminarayan and Jain communities across India and the world. It is now tough to distinguish a Hindu temple from a Jain one in most North Indian cities. There is nothing remotely Eastern or Southern in the styling. It has become the vocabulary of Sanatana Dharma, or Neo-Hinduism.
Wherever these temples appear, a particular form of Hinduism follows. One that equates vegetarian food with purity and meat-eating with pollution. One that presents itself as the correction of historical wrongs. The patrons recollect how during Islamic rule, in Gujarat and Rajasthan, deities were hidden in Rajput mansions. The haveli did not announce the presence of the divine like ancient temples. These communities yearned to build temples that could match, visually and symbolically, the spires of churches and the minarets of mosques. Their temples are, therefore, described as Shikhara-baddha: displaying mountain peaks.
The divine couple disappears
To understand the significance of this style of temple architecture, we have to know what the Hindu temple originally was. Early Hindu temples were natural: sacred groves, confluences of rivers, and faraway grottos. Stone temples appeared in India roughly 1,500 years ago. The roof represented the Himalayas, the doorways bore symbols of the Ganga and Yamuna, and the walls depicted stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, epics whose events unfolded in Arya-varta. When Brahmins migrated south, they brought this sacred northern geography with them through architecture.
When conquerors broke temples in the North to make way for mosques, kings of the South responded by building massive walls around temple complexes. On the gateways rose towering gopurams, covered in thousands of painted figures, a defiant counter-statement directed at the northern iconoclasts.
At its core, the Hindu temple was a Tantrik shrine. Within, Shiva and Parvati sat in intimate symbolic union, expressed as the linga set in the yoni trough. The Vaishnava temple softened this erotic expression into romance, separating the shrines of god and goddess so that they could be ceremonially reunited in chariot processions and boat festivals. The divine couple was the organising principle of the sacred space.
The Muslims were not just against idol worship; they were also monotheists and preferred the male vocabulary. That influence shapes much of modern Hindu temple vocabulary. The mosque was a prayer hall, not the house of god as a temple wall. Modern temples became prayer halls and divine courts (durbars).
In the Jaipur marble temple, the intimacy of the divine couple disappears. Goddesses stand separately, formally, barely touching. The female form is often absent entirely. Instead, the gods are presented as solitary figures, as celibate monk-teachers, as sons with invisible mothers.
The marble temple, with its opulent chandeliers, its house-keeping staff and industrial efficiency, does not simply reflect a community’s wealth or aesthetic preference. It encodes a doctrine, and a politics. The question worth asking is not whether these temples are beautiful. They are. The question is what they are saying, and to whom.
