CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 58 of 120

Correct — B, Chandrakant Sompura. He is the chief architect of the Shree Ram Janmbhoomi Mandir at Ayodhya, an Ahmedabad-based designer who represents the fifteenth generation of a family of temple architects. He trained under his grandfather and has designed more than 130 temples, among them the Ambaji temple at Palanpur, the Akshardham at Gandhinagar, the Swaminarayan temple at Mumbai and the Birla Mandir at Kolkata; the Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan temple he designed in London took a Guinness World Record in 1997. The temple at Ayodhya was consecrated in January 2024, and Sompura received the Padma Shri in 2025.

• (a)P. O. Sompura — The most carefully built distractor — a real person with the same surname. Prabhashankar Oghadbhai Sompura was Chandrakant's grandfather and teacher, a Padma Shri who rebuilt the Somnath temple in Gujarat in 1949. He died long before Ayodhya.
• (c)Brinda Somaya — A Mumbai architect whose practice is known for conservation and institutional work. The similarity of Somaya to Sompura is what the option trades on; she has no role in the Ayodhya temple.
• (d)B. V. Doshi — Balkrishna Doshi, the modernist who won the Pritzker Prize in 2018, worked in concrete, housing and campus design, not in the traditional temple idiom.

The Sompuras are a hereditary community of temple architects and sculptors from Gujarat who work in the Nagara tradition and by the rules of the Vastu Shastra texts. Nagara is the northern of the three classical Indian temple styles set out in those texts, marked by a curvilinear tower over the sanctum; Dravida is the southern style with its stepped pyramidal vimana, and Vesara the hybrid of the Deccan. The Ayodhya temple is designed in the Nagara idiom.

Options (a) and (b) share a surname, which is the whole design of the question: one is the grandson who is building at Ayodhya, the other the grandfather who rebuilt Somnath in 1949. Fix the two by their monuments and the pairing stops being confusable. The other two names are famous Indian architects placed there to make the list plausible rather than to be plausible answers themselves. Anchor the item to the exam, when the temple was under construction, and note where matters have moved since — consecration in January 2024 and the Padma Shri in 2025.

• Chandrakant Sompura is the chief architect of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple at Ayodhya and works from Ahmedabad.
• He belongs to the fifteenth generation of a family of temple architects and has designed over 130 temples.
• His grandfather Prabhashankar Oghadbhai Sompura, a Padma Shri, rebuilt the Somnath temple in 1949 and trained him.
• His other works include the Ambaji temple at Palanpur, the Akshardham at Gandhinagar and the Birla Mandir at Kolkata.
• He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2025; the Ayodhya temple was consecrated in January 2024.

• Choosing P. O. Sompura, who is a real temple architect but of the previous generation and a different monument.
• Confusing the surnames Sompura and Somaya.
• Assuming the best-known Indian architect in the list must be the answer; fame in modern architecture is not the same field.

As a person-to-monument identification, or through the style and structural vocabulary of Indian temple architecture.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The reconstruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat after independence was carried out to the design of

  • (a)Chandrakant Sompura
  • (b)Prabhashankar Oghadbhai Sompura
  • (c)B. V. Doshi
  • (d)Charles Correa

  Answer(b) Prabhashankar Oghadbhai Sompura — the grandfather and teacher of the Ayodhya temple's architect.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The curvilinear tower raised over the sanctum in the northern Indian temple style is known as

  • (a)gopuram
  • (b)vimana
  • (c)shikhara
  • (d)mandapa

  Answer(c) shikhara — the vimana is its southern counterpart and the gopuram is the gateway tower.