Kadwaha, in Isagarh tehsil of Ashoknagar district in India's state of Madhya Pradesh, is a large village having four thousand five hundred seventy-two people residing in eight hundred nineteen families, as per the census report 2011. It has a glorious past, as a capital town of the Chaulukyas, site of local significance as a major religious center that was actively patronised by kings ruling at Chanderi and Narwar, and developed by the acharyas in the ninth, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It is not only an important temple site, consisting of the remains of no fewer than fifteen temples built between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, but it also served as the principal node in an expansive network of Saiva monasteries built by powerful acharyat. Here, significant religious movement could be seen in the guha of Kadambaguhadhivasin, valutating the tapasthana (sacred location) of Mattamayüra Acharyas in tapovana (penance forest), which gradually grew into a sacred center of godliness, place of pilgrimage, and strong fortress. The foundation of the monastery on the sacred center protected power, prosperity and glory of their spirituality endowed learned acharyas. The especial circumstances seem to have aided the acharyas to carve out a 'state within state', in association with woodland dwellers, as it were, to their advantage in the Vindhyan region. The guha was developed into a monastery by the endeavour of the Chaulukya (or Sulki) king Avantivarman who invited Saivacharya Purandara to his country, and established monasteries in his capital town at Mattamayürapura (also known as Kadambaguhä and identified as Kadwaha), as well as at Aranipada (Ranod). The monastery at Kadwaha, was part of an expanding monastic network, associated with a major lineage of Saiva-Siddhanta religious preceptors that, became widely known by the name of "Mattamayura", named so after the place where they established his first monastery. Le Mattamayürapura. The flourishing monasteries and Mattamayūra acharyas serve as the nexus for a wide range of surrounding settlements, formed close alliances with the ruling kings, and became institutionalised within the larger structure of state as Rajagurus. By the tenth and eleventh centuries they had become the dominant religious order in the outlying area, and their monasteries functioned as the hub of state sponsored religious, political, and economic activities. The monastery at Kadwaha was the nucleus of an expanding monastic network, associated with a foremost lineage of acharyas, under whose guardianship and instructions most of the temples of Kadwaha were built. The dominance of Saivism among the temples of the area may be explained in connection with a prominent Saiva monastic order and influential acharyar. The religiously sacred impression of the place persists even today, though in a different way, as the modern Bijasena Devi temple, near the Archaeological Survey of India room, entices crowds of villagers and merchants to Kadwha to worship and exchange goods at a biweekly festival.
Kadwaha, one of the most important temple towns in medieval central India, which underwent an architectural grandeur in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, possessing a monumental Saiva monastery that remains among the earliest of its kind, is by no means a well-known or widely studied place, even among specialists in the field. This anonymity is not due to a late or recent discovery, as Kadwaha has been known to archaeologists for over a century, but probably either due to the absence of its direct linkage with dynastic patronage or regional kingdoms that usually form the basis for art history work, or its location in the rural periphery. In the beginning of the twentieth century.
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