Shri Laxmi Narayan Temple (Birla Mandir)

This guide to the Birla Mandir in Delhi centers on 1939, when the Birla family finished a temple they had spent six years building and invited Mahatma Gandhi to open it, on one condition he set before agreeing. It traces the couple's decades-long fight against caste exclusion at temple gates across India, and the roughly hundred artisans brought from Benares to raise the marble and sandstone walls in the Nagara style. The shikhara above you, the temple's soaring stone spire, reaches nearly fifty meters into the sky.