Their survival is undoubtedly due to their relative isolation being south to the main invasion routes, and also due to their being built of stone which was not destroyed as easily as the ones made of brick in Madhyadesha. The earliest free-standing religious building has been identified by A L Basham as one small round hall at Bairat near Jaipur dating from the 3rd century B.C., which probably originally contained a Buddhist Stupa and was made of brick and wood.

The next landmark was the temple at Jandial, excavated from one of the mounds of Takshashila (Taxila, now in NWFP, Pakistan), which was probably Zoroastrian and contained a square inner sanctuary, a meeting hall and a courtyard with its outer and inner entrances flanked by two large pillars of orthodox Ionian pattern. There are no remains of free-standing Hindu temples erected before the Gupta period, though by this time they must have been built in wood, clay and brick. The Gazetteer of India mentions about the excavation of several deva-grhas (houses of gods) of pre-Christian centuries in extremely fragmentary state and perhaps dating back to the 2nd century B.C., built out of perishable materials. J.C. Harle mentions that the first Hindu icons were made during the Kusana period in Mathura, where their appearance coincides with the emergence of the two great theistic systems of Shaivism and Vaishnavism.

Usually small in size, only insignificant numbers have survived in comparison to the Buddhist and Jain images. Examples of an apsidal-ended shrine surrounded by a peristyle are known to exist in those times from a relief also testified by the excavated remains of earliest surviving Naga Shrine at Sonkh, Mathura.It is among the hilly wooded tracts of Madhya Pradesh, on the southern fringes of the Gupta empire, that the majority of the earliest free-standing shrines are to be found belonging to the later Gupta period.

To be continued...