Place · multi-faith rock-cut caves · India

Ellorā

Also known as Ellora Caves, Verul, Ellora Jain caves, Kailasa Temple Ellora

Function

Archaeology & heritage

Tradition

Rashtrakuta and earlier donative records

Confidence

Mixed / layered — The excavated Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain monuments are documented; their shared use over time is layered.

Location

20.027, 75.179

Worth knowing

The caves were cut from the top down, so that the rock above supported the work below and no scaffolding was needed, and they sit on the trade road from the Konkan ports to the Deccan plateau. Grishneshwar, a jyotirlinga, is a kilometre away and Khuldabad's Sufi necropolis four, so a single small valley carries five traditions.

Connections (15)

• Architectural modelElephanta Caves

  Elephanta's sixth-century Shaiva caves in Bombay harbour, dominated by the colossal three-headed Sadashiva, precede the Rashtrakuta work at Ellora by two centuries and belong to the same western Deccan tradition of cutting temples out of basalt. The Kalachuri or early Chalukya patrons of Elephanta worked out the iconographic programme — the Shiva panels, the great faces — that Ellora's Cave 29 repeats almost exactly.

• Architectural modelPattadakal

  Kailasa at Ellora is modelled on the Dravida temple form codified at Pattadakal: the same pyramidal vimana, the same plan and subsidiary shrines, worked in the negative. The Rashtrakutas had taken the Deccan from the Chalukyas, and one reading of the monolith is that they cut their predecessors' temple type out of a hill to prove they could — the inscription's claim is that even its builder wondered how he had done it.

• PatronageManyakheta

  Mānyakheta was the Rashtrakuta capital from about 818, and Kailasa at Ellora is the dynasty's greatest commission, begun under Krishna I in the eighth century. The Arab geographers ranked the Rashtrakutas among the four great empires of the world, alongside the Abbasids, the Byzantines and the Tang — a judgement based on what their merchants saw at these ports and this capital.

• Traditional seat ofManyakheta

  Mānyakheta is now Malkhed, a small town in Kalaburagi district with almost nothing above ground of the capital that ruled the Deccan for two centuries. Its greatest surviving commission is two hundred and fifty kilometres away at Ellora. That gap between a vanished capital and a durable monument is the ordinary condition of Deccan dynastic history, and it is why the temples carry the record that the cities do not.

• Architectural modelThanjavur Brihadishvara

  Ellora's Kailasa is a Dravida temple cut out of a hill; Thanjavur's Brihadishvara is the same form built up in dressed granite two centuries later and taken to sixty-six metres. Between them they are the two extremes of what south Indian architecture attempted — one a subtractive act of enormous risk with no possibility of correction, the other an additive one of enormous logistics, requiring granite hauled into a district that has none.

• Adjacent rock-cut siteAurangabad Caves

  The twelve Buddhist caves on the hill above Aurangabad, cut in the sixth and seventh centuries, sit a few kilometres from Ellora, and their Tara and Avalokiteshvara figures belong to the same late Mahayana phase as Ellora's Buddhist group. Two chapters of one Deccan tradition of cutting monasteries and temples from the trap rock, which ran for a thousand years and ended when the patronage that funded it moved elsewhere.

• Site adjacencyGrishneshvara / Ghushmesha

  Grishneshwar sits within a kilometre of the Ellora rock-cut cave complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site with 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain monuments carved between the 6th and 10th centuries. The Jyotirlinga's proximity to Cave 16, the Kailasa temple, embeds it directly in the Rashtrakuta-era Shaiva monumental landscape of the western Deccan.

• Architectural modelAjantā caves

  Ajantā is cut, painted and abandoned by about 480; Ellora begins a century later four hours away and carries the same tradition into Hindu and Jain excavation, ending at Kailāsa, which is carved downward from the hilltop as one piece. The Deccan's rock-cutting is continuous across the religions. Ajantā was then lost entirely until a British hunting party came on it in 1819, while Ellora was never forgotten and appears in medieval and Mughal accounts alike.

• Shared site withDhamnar caves

  Dhamnār and Ellora both cut Buddhist and Hindu excavations into one rock face, and both end with a monolithic Hindu temple carved downward out of the hill. Ellora's Kailāsa is the enormous version; Dhamnār's Dharmanātha is the same idea at a scale one village could pay for. Kailāsa removed about two hundred thousand tonnes of rock and was cut from the top down over several generations, with no possibility of correcting a mistake once made.

• CampaignAgra Fort

  Babur records in the Bāburnāma that he ordered the Gwalior colossi destroyed in 1527, and the damage to the faces and limbs of the cliff Tīrthankaras is his. The statues were not removed, only defaced, and dozens of them are still there along the fort road. Babur's own account says he found the figures naked and ordered them broken, and then admired the fort's palaces in the same passage, which is a fair summary of his relation to Indian building.

• Shared site withGwalior Fort

  Gwalior's fort rock carries dozens of Jain colossi cut into its cliffs in the fifteenth century under the Tomars, alongside the palaces and the Hindu temples. Babur had them defaced in 1527; the figures were left in place, and the damage is still what you see first. The Tomar rulers also built the Man Mandir palace on the same rock, with its blue and yellow tilework, so one fort carries Jain colossi, Hindu temples and a Rajput palace together.

• In the same set asAjantā caves

  Ajanta and Ellora were inscribed in the same year, are a hundred kilometres apart, and do not overlap in time: Ajanta's two phases end about 480 and Ellora's excavation begins in the sixth century and runs to the tenth. Ajanta is Buddhist and holds the painting; Ellora is Buddhist, Hindu and Jain in one cliff and holds the architecture cut as sculpture.

• AnalogueDhamnar caves

  Ellora's thirty-four excavations and Dhamnar's fifty are the two places where Buddhist, Hindu and in one case Jain rock-cutting share a single cliff across several centuries. The technique is identical because the masons' tradition was continuous; what changed was who was paying. Rock-cut architecture is the clearest evidence that these traditions used the same workforce.

• Site adjacencyKhuldābād

  Khuldabad's Chishti necropolis, the Grishneshwar jyotirlinga and Ellora's Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves lie within a few kilometres of each other, and Daulatabad's fort closes the same valley. Four kinds of sacred and political claim in one small landscape is the ordinary condition of Indian geography rather than an exception, and this valley is where it is most compressed.

• Site withinAurangabad / Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar

  The Ellora Caves sit 29 kilometres northwest of Aurangabad on the Deccan trade road from the Konkan ports — within Aurangabad district and administered from the city. Ellora's thirty-four Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rock-cut excavations and the Kailasa monolithic temple are the single largest heritage draw of the Aurangabad region, and the city serves as the base for pilgrimage and visitors to the whole Ellora-Khuldabad-Grishneshwar cluster.

On these journeys

• Shared & layered sites
• Dakshiṇāpatha — the Great Southern Road
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Deccan dynasties — Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, Hoysala, Kakatiya
• Jain monuments

Sources

Wikipedia, “Ellora Caves”. UNESCO World Heritage nomination file for the Ellora Caves (1983); Walter Spink on the Ellora sequence; Archaeological Survey of India, Aurangabad circle records.

• UNESCO — Ellora Caves
• Wikipedia