Barabar Caves

From the outside they are little more than dark doorways in a bare granite outcrop on the plains of Bihar. Step inside, however, and the walls shine like glass: more than two thousand years ago, workers hollowed chambers out of solid granite and then polished every surface to a mirror finish, so smooth that a torch flame is reflected in the rock and a single voice rings on in a long, humming echo. The Barabar Caves are the oldest surviving rock-cut chambers in India, the first step in a tradition that would later produce Ajanta and Ellora.

The caves belong to the Maurya Empire of the 3rd century BCE. Four are cut into Barabar Hill and three more into neighbouring Nagarjuni Hill, about a mile and a half away. Inscriptions in Brahmi script record that the emperor Ashoka, under his title Piyadasi, gave several of them to the Ajivikas, an ascetic movement contemporary with early Buddhism and Jainism that has since vanished; one inscription is dated to the twelfth year of his reign. His grandson Dasaratha later dedicated the Nagarjuni caves to the same community. Most chambers consist of a long vaulted hall leading to a smaller rounded cell, and the curved ceilings deliberately copy the timber and thatch buildings of the time in stone. Long after the Ajivikas disappeared, Buddhists, Jains and Hindus used the caves and left their own carvings and inscriptions.

The most celebrated is the Lomas Rishi Cave, whose entrance is carved as a pointed, ogee-shaped arch imitating a wooden gable. Along its curve a procession of elephants moves towards stupa emblems, one of the earliest pieces of relief sculpture known from the Maurya period. This doorway is the first stone example of the so-called chaitya arch, a form that went on to frame Buddhist cave temples and temple windows across India for centuries. The interior was never finished; scholars think a fault in the rock or a change of political fortunes halted the work, and rough bosses of stone still stand on the floor. The caves also found a place in English literature: E. M. Forster drew on them for the fictional Marabar Caves, whose unsettling echo lies at the heart of his novel A Passage to India.

Getting there

The caves rise from the countryside of Jehanabad district in Bihar, about 11 km from the small town of Makhdumpur and roughly 24 km north of the city of Gaya. Gaya Airport (GAY), which mainly serves pilgrims to nearby Bodh Gaya, is about 31 km away. Gaya Junction, on the main railway line between Delhi and Kolkata, is the usual rail gateway, and the hills are reached from there by road.