Place · chaitya hall · India
Kārlā Caves
Also known as Karle, Karla, Ekvira
The largest and best-preserved early chaitya hall in India, cut in the first century BCE above the Bhor Ghat pass — a barrel-vaulted nave forty-five metres deep with a teak rib frame still in place, a stone screen, and donative inscriptions naming merchants, bankers and a Greek, Yavana, among the donors.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Patron dynasty
- Satavahana
- Tradition
- Donative inscriptions of traders and guilds
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.783, 73.470 (approximate)
Worth knowing
An Ekvira temple stands in the courtyard and is busier than the cave: the Koli fishing communities of the Konkan hold her as their family goddess and come up the ghat for her festival, so a Buddhist hall of the Satavahana period is entered through a living Hindu shrine.
Connections (3)
- Trade routeSopara
Kārla and Bhājā sit at the top of the Bhor Ghat, the pass carrying goods from the Konkan ports to the Deccan plateau. The caves are on the road because the donors were on the road: their inscriptions name merchants, guilds and caravan traders far more often than kings. Kārla's chaitya hall still has its original wooden ceiling ribs in place after two thousand years, and its pillar inscriptions name Yavana — Greek or west-Asian — donors among the merchants.
- Companion in the same setBhājā Caves
Kārla, Bhājā and Bedsē are within a few kilometres of each other above the Bhor Ghat and span about two centuries of rock-cutting. Bhājā is the earliest and still imitates timber construction; Kārla is the largest chaitya hall in India and has stopped pretending to be made of wood. Bhājā still carries the sockets and fragments of the wooden façade its masons were imitating, which is why the sequence between the three caves can be read as a technique learning to trust stone.
- Architectural modelAjantā caves
Karla's chaitya of the first century BCE and Ajanta's Cave 19 and 26 of the fifth century CE are the two ends of the same hall type — apsidal plan, barrel vault, stupa at the far end, a screen and a great horseshoe window over the door. What changes in six hundred years is that the wooden ribs become carved stone imitations of wooden ribs, and the plain stupa acquires a standing Buddha on its front, because by then there were images.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Karla Caves”. The Nasik and Naneghat cave inscriptions in Epigraphia Indica and in Senart’s corpus; Himanshu Ray, Monastery and Guild (1986).
Open Kārlā Caves in the repository →