Indian tourists, of course, were not the first priority when the Indian government first decided to develop Khajuraho as a heritage destina...
Indian tourists, of course, were not the first priority when the Indian government first decided to develop Khajuraho as a heritage destination in the 1950s. Protected by the ASI, the twenty-two surviving temples at Khajuraho continue to be identified by the monikers given them in the mid-nineteenth century by Alexander Cunningham, first director-general of the ASI: the Western Group, the Eastern Group and the Southern Group.
The Eastern and Southern groups are not collectively landscaped or ticketed, though many of the individual temples have received the standard ASI treatment: a plaque inscribed with architectural details, a small lawn surrounding the structure, a gated boundary wall around the lawn, and a single, usually taciturn, security guard at the gate.
Meanwhile, the Western Group – a ticketed rectangular complex including the Lakshmana, Kandariya Mahadev and Devi Jagadambi temples, which was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1986 – ranks consistently among the Indian monuments most visited by foreigners. The ASI figures from ticket sales in 2018 show that it had 80,000 foreign visitors that year, in tenth place (the Taj Mahal tops the list, with 7,90,000 foreigners having bought tickets to see it that year).
In the fiscal year 2020, only about 42,000 foreigners...
