Ellora Caves

The Ellora Caves are a complex of more than a hundred rock-cut temples and monasteries carved into a basalt escarpment in the Charanandri Hills, about 29 kilometres north-west of Aurangabad in Maharashtra, western India. Made roughly between 600 and 1000 CE, with some Jain work continuing later, they bring together Buddhist, Hindu and Jain monuments side by side. Their centrepiece, the Kailasa temple, is a complete temple cut downwards out of a single mass of rock.

Thirty-four of the caves are the principal monuments: twelve Buddhist at the southern end, seventeen Hindu in the middle and five Jain to the north. Because the three groups share so many stylistic features, their order of construction has long been argued over. Earlier scholars assumed the Buddhist caves came first; many now think the oldest Hindu caves, such as the great Shiva cave numbered 29, are at least as early, and credit them to the Kalachuri dynasty in the sixth century. The Buddhist caves are usually dated to between about 600 and 730, perhaps under Chalukya rule, and the later Hindu and earlier Jain caves to the Rashtrakuta kings who dominated the Deccan from the mid-eighth century. Kings, merchants and wealthy local families all paid for the work, and the site's position beside a trade route made it a commercial as well as a religious centre.

Most of the Buddhist caves are monasteries, some rising to three storeys, with living quarters, kitchens and shrines carved into the cliff. Cave 10, the only Buddhist prayer hall, dates from around 650; its ceiling is cut to look like timber ribs, which earned it the name "Carpenter's Cave". The images of goddesses and mandalas in caves 11 and 12 are taken as evidence that tantric forms of Buddhism were well established in the region by the eighth century.

The Hindu caves are mostly dedicated to Shiva but honour many other deities of Hinduism. An inscription of the Rashtrakuta ruler Dantidurga records his prayers in Cave 15. The Kailasa temple, Cave 16, is attributed to his successor Krishna I, whose reign is dated to the 750s to 770s or 780s depending on the source. Its courtyard measures about 82 by 46 metres at the base and 30 metres high, and the shrine, hall, gateway and side shrines were all freed from the hillside by cutting away the surrounding stone. A copper-plate grant of 812 found in Baroda praises a great edifice built on a hill by Krishnaraja and imagines its architect astonished at his own work.

The five Jain caves of the Digambara sect were begun in the ninth century and, according to the scholar José Pereira, consist of around twenty-three separate excavations. Activity continued under the Yadava dynasty, whose capital Deogiri lay about ten kilometres away; a donor's inscription of 1235 records new images of the Jinas. That ended when Deogiri fell to the Delhi Sultanate in 1294, and a Marathi text of the late thirteenth century already notes that regular worship at Ellora had ceased.

The caves were never lost. Al-Masudi, writing in Baghdad in the tenth century, described a great pilgrimage temple apparently identifiable with Ellora, and the Bahmani founder Ala-ud-Din Bahman Shah camped there in 1352. Under the Mughal Empire the emperor Aurangzeb and his nobles picnicked at the site, and one of his courtiers admired its lifelike carvings while noting their neglect. Later oral traditions claim that Aurangzeb tried to destroy the Kailasa temple, but no historical record supports this. European travellers, including Thévenot and Niccolao Manucci, left descriptions, not always accurate; Manucci thought the work Chinese.

Many idols in all three groups have defaced heads, noses and limbs, while decorative carving on pillars and walls largely survives. Scholars trace much of this damage to iconoclasm by Muslim armies in the Deccan between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the historian Carl Ernst notes that some Muslim writers of the period deplored such destruction.

The caves were studied from the British colonial period onwards and are now protected by the Archaeological Survey of India. UNESCO inscribed them as a World Heritage Site in 1983, the same year as Ajanta, about 100 kilometres away. A Jain shrine on the hill above the main group, with a carved image of Parshvanatha and an inscription of 1234, remains in active worship.