Found Under A Tree
Temple No. 42 stood in the Maluti temple street with a full-grown tree rooted in its crown and creeper covering the whole upper register. The number 42 was still legible, painted on the plinth at the left corner.
Beneath the growth the façade was intact enough to read: a curved bangla roofline, an arched doorway framed by carved colonnettes, and register after register of terracotta panels — figures, rosettes and foliate borders — running the full height of the wall.
Root action is the single greatest threat to Maluti's brick temples. Left alone, the tree would have split the shell apart within a few seasons.
The Damage Behind The Façade
Seen from the side, the extent of the loss was clear. The rear-left quarter of the temple had already come down, exposing the rubble-and-lime core that the terracotta skin was built against.
Once the core is open to rain it erodes quickly, and every monsoon takes more of the wall with it. The decision was taken to dismantle the failing sections and rebuild them — not to patch over a structure that was still moving.
Numbering Every Piece
Before anything was touched, each terracotta and moulded brick element on the failing elevation was marked in sequence — A1, A2, A3 and onward past A37 — and recorded against a measured drawing.
This is what makes the difference between reconstruction and restoration. The numbering is the memory of the building: it is the only way a dismantled façade can be put back in exactly the order the original craftsmen laid it.
Nothing is replaced that can be re-set. New material is introduced only where the original is missing or too far decayed to carry load.
Recording The Elevation
The marking was done alongside a full photographic record — each panel shot square-on so the carved subject, its condition and its exact position were all documented before dismantling began.
The work is slow and deliberate. One craftsman marks while another photographs, moving across the elevation register by register in the shade of an umbrella through the Dumka summer.
Dismantling To The Core
With the elevation recorded, the loose fabric came away and the temple's core was exposed: a dense mass of brick bat and lime, shot through with the root system that had been prising it apart.
Bamboo scaffolding, lashed with rope, went up around the structure. Roots were cut back and removed by hand rather than pulled, so the surrounding masonry was not dragged out with them.
Rebuilding From The Plinth
Reconstruction started at the plinth and worked upward, each numbered element returning to the position it had been lifted from. The mouldings of the base course were set first to establish the line for everything above.
Behind the terracotta face, the backing masonry was rebuilt in brick bedded in surkhi-chuna — the same lime-and-brick-dust mortar the original builders used, not cement.
The Façade Returns
Course by course the elevation came back: the fluted pilasters, the carved colonnette beside the entrance, the recessed panels and the stepped cornice mouldings, all re-set in their recorded sequence.
New bricks — stacked ready at the right of the frame — were used only for the hidden backing wall. Every visible element on the face is original fabric returned to its place.
Set In Lime, Not Cement
Working from bamboo staging, craftsmen bedded each terracotta piece in surkhi-chuna mortar mixed on site. Lime moves with the building and lets it breathe; cement is rigid and traps moisture, and in a brick temple it does more harm than the decay it was meant to arrest.
The mortar was prepared in tanks beside the temples — lime slaked in one, brick dust ground and screened in another, with bel fruit and molasses added as traditional binders.
Back In The Street
The rebuilt elevation seen in its setting, with the conserved temples of the Maluti group standing on either side — the shape the village would have had when the Baj Basanta rajas were still raising shrines here.
Temple No. 42 is one structure in a much larger programme. The conservation of the Maluti group has run in phases, each one taking on the next cluster of temples in the queue.