Kantajew Temple

The Kantajew temple at Kantanagar in Dinajpur is the finest terracotta building in Bangladesh, put up by two generations of the Dinajpur rajahs and finished in the middle of the eighteenth century. Every outer surface of it is faced in moulded terracotta plaques, fifteen thousand of them, showing the Ramayana and the Mahabharata alongside court scenes, hunts and ships. It was built as a navaratna with nine spires and the earthquake of 1897 took all nine off. The Rash Mela pulls tens of thousands in November. Wheat fields surround the platform. Fifteen thousand plaques took the moulders and the builders roughly half a century to set in place.