The workshop nobody visits
Aihole has 125 temples. On a typical weekday, you might share them with a handful of schoolchildren and a caretaker who has memorised the ASI signboards well enough to recite them without looking. The Durga Temple here, misnamed, it has nothing to do with the goddess and everything to do with its apse-shaped plan borrowed from Buddhist chaityas, dates to roughly the sixth century CE. Stand inside it and you are standing inside an architectural argument that was still being resolved when the Kailasa Temple at Ellora was being carved out of a single rock face a century later.
