Vaital Mandir Bhubaneswar

This 8th-century temple, with a double-storey ‘wagon roof’ influenced by Buddhist cave architecture, was a centre of tantric worship, eroticism and bloody sacrifice. Look closely and you’ll see some very early erotic carvings on the walls. Chamunda (a fearsome incarnation of the Hindu mother goddess) can be seen in the dingy interior, although her necklace of skulls and her bed of corpses are usually hidden beneath her temple robes.