Bishnupur

For close to a thousand years Bishnupur was the capital of the Malla rulers of Mallabhum, and its golden age came in the seventeenth century when Bir Hambir and his successors turned to Vaishnavism and began building. Bengal's delta offers alluvium rather than quarries, so the temples are brick and laterite, and their surfaces are the medium: every square foot of the Jor Bangla and Shyam Rai temples is carved terracotta, showing Krishna with the gopis, Rama's army crossing to Lanka, hunting scenes, Portuguese soldiers with muskets and women drying their hair. The roofs copy village thatch in brick, a form called chala that exists nowhere else.

The Rasmancha of about 1600 is the strangest and best building here, a pyramidal laterite pavilion on arcaded galleries where all the town's Krishna idols were gathered once a year for the Ras festival. Nearby the Dalmadal, an enormous seventeenth-century iron cannon, sits under a canopy with its own legend of Krishna firing it to save the town from Maratha raiders. Bishnupur is also a craft town: handloom sheds still throw Baluchari silk saris whose pallus carry woven mythological scenes, potters turn the Bankura terracotta horse, and the Bishnupur gharana, founded by musicians of the Malla court, keeps dhrupad singing alive at the December music festival.