Heritage journeys across India

Heritage travel in India rewards early starts. The Taj Mahal is worth the six o'clock gate because the marble runs pink, then white, then gold within an hour, and because the inlay of carnelian and lapis only reads properly in low light. Thirty-seven kilometres west, Akbar's abandoned capital at Fatehpur Sikri, occupied from 1571 to 1585, is red sandstone silence beneath the fifty-four-metre Buland Darwaza. In Madhya Pradesh the Chandelas left Khajuraho's Kandariya Mahadeva rising in tiers of sculpture around 1030, and Orchha's cenotaphs still stand over the Betwa. Maharashtra holds the two greatest excavations in the country: Ajanta's Buddhist painting, cut between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE, and Ellora's Kailasa temple, carved downward out of a single basalt hillside. Hampi spreads a Vijayanagara capital across granite and the Tungabhadra, its Vittala stone chariot reached along the river path below Matanga Hill, which is where to stand at sunrise. Tamil Nadu answers with Thanjavur's Brihadeeswarar temple, consecrated by Rajaraja Chola around 1010, and the Pallava shore at Mahabalipuram. Odisha's Konark builds an entire temple as a chariot on twenty-four carved wheels. We arrange licensed guides, quiet-hour entry and, where it is permitted, access at sunset.