Location: Deogarh 🌎

The Dashavatara Temple is an early 6th century Vishnu Hindu temple located at Deogarh, Uttar Pradesh which is 125 kilometers from Jhansi, in the Betwa River valley in northern-central India. It has a simple, one cell square plan and is one of the earliest Hindu stone temples still surviving today. Built in the Gupta Period, the Dashavatara Temple at Deogarh shows the ornate Gupta style architecture.The temple at Deogarh is dedicated to Vishnu but includes in its small footprint images of various deities such as Shiva, Parvati, Kartikeya, Brahma, Indra, River goddesses Ganga and Yamuna, as well as a panel showing the five Pandavas of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. The Temple was built out of stone and masonry brick. Legends associated with Vishnu are sculpted in the interior and exterior walls of the temple. Also carved are secular scenes and amorous couples in various stages of courtship and intimacy.According to Alexander Lubotsky, this temple was built according to the third khanda of the Hindu text Vishnudharmottara Purana, which describes the design and architecture of the Sarvatobhadra-style temple, thus providing a floruit for the text and likely temple tradition that existed in ancient India. Though ruined, the temple is preserved in a good enough condition to be a key temple in the Hindu temple architecture scholarship, particularly the roots of the North Indian style of temple design.The Dashavatara temple is locally known as Sagar marh, which literally means “the temple on the tank”, a name it gets from the square water pool cut into the rock in front.