The terracotta facades of eighteenth-century temples in Bengal are covered with thousands of small plaques. Read from a distance they form a pattern; read up close they become scenes from the epics, from village life and from the court.
This essay looks at how the plaques are arranged. Some run like a comic strip from left to right; others circle a doorway or climb a pillar. The makers, it argues, were thinking carefully about how a walking viewer meets a story.
A story you walk around
The temple wall is a book that can only be read on foot.
Many of these plaques are now eroding or have been removed. Reading them is also a way of recording them before they are lost.
