Dantan's Rekha Temples

Dantan is a historically significant town that most travellers pass through without understanding what they are looking at. It sits on what was once one of the great pilgrimage roads of eastern India (the route from Bengal's interior to Jagannath Puri in Odisha) and in the 16th century, the great Vaishnava reformer Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is said to have passed through here on his own journey south.
The town contains three nineteenth-century temples, the Jagannath Temple, the Shyamaleswar Temple, and the Chandaneswar Temple, that announce, clearly and emphatically, which side of the cultural border Dantan fell on. All three are built in the rekha deul style: the curvilinear shikhara tower form that is the defining architectural language of Odia temple design, as exemplified by the Lingaraja Temple at Bhubaneswar and ultimately the Jagannath Temple at Puri. Finding these characteristically Odia structures in a Bengali district is itself a statement of the historical ambiguity of this border zone.
The Jagannath Temple, as might be expected from a town that sat on the Puri pilgrimage route, was likely the most significant of the three in its heyday. The proximity to the Bengal-Odisha border meant that Jagannath worship had deep roots here; the fact that Kurumbera Fort contains Jagannath idols discovered in a locked room strengthens the picture of a zone where Jagannath devotion was central long before the modern period. The Shyamaleswar Temple is dedicated to Shiva and the Chandaneswar to a form of Shiva/Mahadeva. All three are active places of worship, surrounded by trees, with shaded sitting areas for devotees.