Detour to Ranakpur temple

On the road from Jodhpur to Udaipur, there is a temple worth a detour and a stop. The Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara temple or, more simply, the Jain temple of Ranakpur, is a massive place of worship located about 170 km from Jodhpur and about 90 km from Udaipur.

The skepticism nourished after the insistent work of conviction by the owner of the hotel where we stayed in Jodhpur, to entice us to stop at the temple, was immediately fled. The sacred place is a wonderful example of temple architecture in Rajasthan.

From the outside, despite the forest of inlaid domes that surmounts the high stratified base, the complexity of the interior is not evident: a forest of columns arranged on different planes, each decorated with complex bas-reliefs that never repeat the same on any of the 1400 monoliths that support the roof. This is a sequence of covered and uncovered areas, running along corridors and courtyards, from which you can see the central dome with a complex set of sculptures.

The sunlight enters irregularly into the colonnaded space, leaving dark caverns and areas lapped by gleams that draw the sculpted figures. Ornamental motifs, animals, human figures and divinities in equivocal positions, and a religious silence all around. It only takes half an hour to visit the temple, or it will take a lifetime to observe all the micro sculptures carved in marble.