Place · Buddhist rock-cut caves · India
Junnar cave groups
/d͡ʒunːəɾ/
The largest concentration of rock-cut excavations in India — around 160 Buddhist caves spread across four hills near Junnar, 90 kilometres north of Pune — cut by the Satavahana dynasty between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Junnar was a major commercial and administrative centre on the Naneghat trade pass connecting the Deccan plateau to the Konkan coast. The Lenyadri group includes a Ganesha temple (one of the eight Ashtavinayak), the Manmodi group includes a chaitya hall, and the Shivneri hill (now most famous as the birthplace of Shivaji in 1630) carries 60 Buddhist cells. The number of caves — more than Ellora, Ajanta, Nasik and Karla combined — reflects Junnar's role as a Hinayana monastic city.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Patron dynasty
- Satavahana
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.200, 73.880
Connections (4)
- Shared site withGirijatmaj, Junnar
Cave eight of the Leṇyādri group at Junnar, cut as a Buddhist hall in the first centuries CE, is now Girijātmaj, one of the eight Aṣṭavināyaka shrines. A pillarless chaitya became a Gaṇeśa temple, and the circuit's only cave shrine is a Buddhist building reused. The hall has no supporting pillar because it was cut from the living rock rather than built, which is why an eighteenth-century Gaṇeśa shrine has a first-century Buddhist interior.
- Route adjacencyNāneghāṭ
Junnar's two hundred excavations cluster around the Nāneghāt pass, which carries the road from the Konkan ports up to the Deccan plateau. The pass itself holds a Sātavāhana inscription listing sacrificial fees — a toll gate and a monastery economy in the same defile. The Nāneghāt inscription of Nāganikā is also one of the earliest records in India to name a queen as the author of a royal text rather than as its subject.
- CampaignGautamīputra Sātakarṇi
Nahapana's Kshatrapa inscriptions are at Junnar and his coins were restruck by Gautamiputra with the original dies still partly legible underneath — which is how the two dynasties' chronologies were locked together. The war was about these passes: whoever held Junnar and the Naneghat controlled the traffic from the Konkan ports to the plateau, and the caves on both sides carry the donations of the winners and losers in turn.
- Life routeAfanasy Nikitin
Nikitin stayed two monsoons at Junnar in the Western Ghats, where the Bahmani sultan moved his court during the rains. He describes the fort’s hilltop position, the heavy monsoon rainfall and the horse market in which his own horse was briefly confiscated by the governor Asad Khan — the episode that first required him to produce the Shahada and so almost converted him in form if not in belief.
On these journeys
- Dakshiṇāpatha — the Great Southern Road
- Satavahana Deccan & the rock-cut trade route
- Rock-cut Buddhism
- Afanasy Nikitin — Tver merchant in the Bahmani Deccan (1468–1474)
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
Open Junnar cave groups in the repository →