Places to Visit in Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh is India's second-largest state by area, after Rajasthan, and possibly its most underestimated. It sits at the country's geographic heart, bordered by five states, and contains within its 308,000 square kilometres a staggering density of things worth travelling for: the UNESCO-listed erotic and devotional temples of Khajuraho, three of India's best tiger reserves (Kanha, Bandhavgarh, and Pench), the hilltop Jain temples of Sonagiri, the prehistoric rock-shelter paintings of Bhimbetka, and a lattice of river gorges along the Narmada, Betwa, and Chambal that still feels genuinely remote.

Bhopal, the capital, is a city of two lakes and a complicated past — ruled for more than a century by the Begums of Bhopal, home to Bharat Bhavan, one of India's leading arts centres, and the site of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster, whose long legal and environmental aftershocks continue. The city's old quarter, Chowk Bazaar, retains the scale and texture of a 19th-century royal capital, with ornate palaces and a skyline of mosque minarets.

The state's medieval history is inseparable from the Chandela Rajput dynasty, whose extraordinary building programme between roughly 950 and 1050 CE produced the Khajuraho temple complex — 85 temples originally, of which approximately 25 survive in varying states of preservation. The temples' erotic sculptures, which represent a fraction of the total iconographic programme, have made Khajuraho famous; what is less often noted is the sculptural quality of the celestial musicians, apsaras, and narrative military friezes that constitute the overwhelming majority of the surface carving.

Winters (October through February) are cool and clear. Summers are extreme, with temperatures above 45°C common across the Malwa and Bundelkhand plateaus. The monsoon from June to September greens the forests, but the tiger reserves close their core zones for the season and some jungle tracks become impassable.