Places

Khajuraho Group of MonumentsHeritageUNESCOChhatarpur

Chandela temples built at the dynasty's height between roughly 950 and 1050, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 under criteria (i) and (iii). Around twenty-odd survive of an original count usually given as eighty-five, in western, eastern and southern groups, and they are Hindu and Jain together rather than Hindu alone. Architecturally they are the clearest statement of the nagara idiom — a shikhara built up from clustered subsidiary spires so the tower reads as a mountain range rather than a cone, on a raised platform with no enclosing wall, so the building is meant to be walked around and seen whole. Kandariya Mahadeva is the largest. The erotic sculpture that draws the visitors is a fraction of the total programme.

Best time: October–March; February for the dance festival.

OrchhaHeritageNiwari

The Bundela capital on a bend of the Betwa — Jahangir Mahal, Raj Mahal, the Chaturbhuj temple built to a height that makes it read as a fort, and a line of sandstone chhatris on the riverbank marking the cremation sites of the Bundela rulers. The Ram Raja temple occupies the Rani Mahal rather than the Chaturbhuj that was built for it, and Rama is worshipped there as a reigning king: the deity receives an armed guard of honour and a state salute, and the temple keeps royal rather than priestly protocol. The legend explains this by a condition attached to the image — that it would stay wherever it was first set down.

Best time: October–March.

Jhansi FortHeritageJhansi

A granite hill fort begun by the Orchha Bundelas in the seventeenth century, later Maratha, and the centre of the 1857 fighting under Rani Lakshmibai. The walls sit directly on the rock with almost no foundation course — the hill is the foundation — which is how most Bundelkhand forts are built.

Datia Palace (Bir Singh Deo Mahal)HeritageDatia

A seven-storey stone palace built by Bir Singh Deo of Orchha in the early seventeenth century, never occupied and never finished internally. It is built entirely of stone and brick with no timber in the structure, and the upper floors are reached by staircases hidden inside the wall thickness.

Kalinjar FortHeritageBanda

An isolated Vindhyan outcrop rising about 240 m above the plain, the Chandelas' fortress capital from the late tenth century and never taken by direct assault for centuries. The Neelkanth cave temple below the ramparts holds a large blue-black linga; rock-cut tanks inside the walls, of which Koth Tirth is the largest, are what let the fort hold out. Sher Shah Suri was mortally wounded here in 1545 while besieging its Baghela holder.

Mahoba and the Chandela tanksHeritageMahoba

The Chandela capital of Paramardideva, and the home ground of the Alha cycle. Madan Sagar and Kirat Sagar are working eleventh-century reservoirs with granite-faced bunds, with island temple ruins standing in the water. The Kajli fair is held here the day after Raksha Bandhan.

Panna Tiger Reserve and the Ken gorgeWildlifePanna, Chhatarpur

Sandstone plateau, gorge and teak forest along the Ken. The reserve lost its entire tiger population to poaching by 2009 and was repopulated from Bandhavgarh, Kanha and Pench in one of the few reintroductions anywhere to have produced a breeding population from zero. The Ken below carries gharial and mugger, protected in the Ken Gharial Sanctuary, and the river is the donor in the Ken–Betwa interlinking scheme.

Best time: October–April.

Panna diamond fieldHeritagePanna

India's only producing diamond field, worked two ways at once: the mechanised Majhgawan pipe mine south of Panna town, and several hundred shallow pits of roughly eight feet square, each leased to an individual for a small fee and dug and washed by hand. Anything found on a leased pit must by law be surrendered to the government diamond office at Panna, which auctions it and returns the proceeds to the finder less royalty.

ChitrakootPilgrimageChitrakoot, Satna

The Mandakini gorge and the Kamadgiri hill, identified as the place where Rama spent the first years of exile. The five-kilometre barefoot parikrama of Kamadgiri, the ghats at Ramghat, Gupt Godavari's water-floored caves and Sphatik Shila are the fixed points. The town sits astride the Bundelkhand–Bagelkhand boundary and is administered from both sides of it.

Best time: October–March; Somvati Amavasya draws the largest crowds.

DeogarhHeritageLalitpur

A Betwa-side hill carrying the Gupta-period Dashavatara temple of about the sixth century — among the earliest surviving north Indian stone temples with a shikhara, and effectively the prototype of the form that reaches its height at Khajuraho five centuries later — along with more than thirty Jain temples and hundreds of loose sculptures and inscriptions.

SonagiriPilgrimageDatia

A hill covered with white Digambara Jain temples, climbed barefoot, and a major site for the Jain merchant communities of the region. The count usually given is seventy-seven temples on the hill and about twenty-six below.

Garhkundar FortHeritageNiwari

A Khangar fort on a low hill, held before the Bundelas took the region in the fourteenth century, and the site the Bundelas' own origin story is told against. It is unrestored and largely unvisited.

Dhubela MuseumHeritageChhatarpur

A lakeside museum in Chhatrasal's memorial complex, holding Chandela and Bundela sculpture, arms and inscriptions collected from across the region — the best single place to see what has been recovered from the tank belt.

CharkhariHeritageMahoba

A small Bundela state town built around a chain of interconnected lakes fed one into the next, with a hill fort above. Locally called the Kashmir of Bundelkhand — a claim about water rather than about mountains, and it says everything about what is scarce here.

Rahatgarh Fort and fallsNatureSagar

A fort on the Bina river with a seasonal fall below it, running only through and just after the monsoon.

Best time: August–October.