Place · rock-cut chaitya & vihara
Bedsā Caves
A first-century BCE chaitya above the Bhor Ghat with the most elaborate pillar capitals of the early western Indian group — bell capitals carrying paired horses, bullocks and elephants with riders — and an apsidal vihara behind it, reached by a steep cut stair.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Patron dynasty
- Satavahana
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.635, 73.547
Worth knowing
Karla, Bhaja and Bedsa are within about fifteen kilometres of each other on the same pass, and between them they show the whole first phase of Indian rock-cut architecture. All three were paid for by the merchants and guilds whose goods crossed the ghat, and all three have the donative inscriptions to prove it.
Connections (1)
- Site adjacencyPitalkhora Caves
Bedsa and Pitalkhora belong to the same first phase of western Deccan excavation and both sit at the head of a pass — Bedsa above the Bhor Ghat, Pitalkhora on the route to the Tapi valley. Pitalkhora's yaksha figures and its elephant-carved doorway are contemporary with Bedsa's capitals, and both sites were abandoned and then partly reoccupied in the Mahayana phase five centuries later.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bedse Caves”. The Nasik and Naneghat cave inscriptions in Epigraphia Indica and in Senart’s corpus; Himanshu Ray, Monastery and Guild (1986).
Open Bedsā Caves in the repository →