WE went there looking for Bankura Horses: the emblem of the Collage Industries emporia. We found them, but we also found much more.
We discovered that, in Incredible India, the 17th-century kings of West Bengal didn't take 'No' for an answer. It wasn’t West Bengal then, of course. It was the independent kingdom of the Mallas. They did, however, have a major problem. They wanted to build magnificent temples so that future generations would remember their reign. Naturally, these: shrines had to be enriched with a great profusion of carvings as other great temples are elsewhere in India. But the local stone was quite unsuitable for sculpting: red late rite is granular and pitted and has an old, worn, look about it even when it is newly quarried. Wood was also out of the question; it would not have survived in their high-humidity lands. They found a unique solution.
We shall never forget the sight of our first Vishnupur temple. In the every light of dawn it glowed a fiery red as if it had just been removed from a furnace. Lifted off the ground level by a low plinth, the temple rose as two beautifully proportioned huts. Roofs curved and sloped in the elegant rural style of Bengal. But there were no flexible bamboo beams on these roofs, no thatch, no matting. Nevertheless, the slope of the thatch, the curve of the bamboo supports, the fine weave of the mat1 all three had been replicated in carefully crafted panels of heat-burnished terracotta.

The wet clay of virtually every brick had been beautifully sculpted before being fired to a time-defying red. Elephants trumpeted, lions roared, kings and queens and their courtiers stood in regal splendour. In the panel above, monkeys marched in two-legged homage to Lord Rama.
There was so much exuberance here, such a feeling of joyousness, so much vigorous attention to detail that we were certain that this temple, and other shrines like it, must have been built at the height of Malla power. But for all their might and achievement, the formidable Malla dynasty vanished into history.
But though, today, very little is known about the Mallas, some of their most memorable successes remain Their unusual sculpted terracotta temples still stand resplendent, challenging time, on the damp, flat, plains of West Bengal.