Elephanta Caves — rock-cut architecture
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Elephanta Caves

  • 2 min read
  • 18.963° N 72.931° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Elephanta Island is itself a product of the Deccan Traps eruptions, formed by volcanic activity about 66 million years ago.
  • The island covers about 10 square kilometres at high tide but about 16 square kilometres at low tide.
  • The Great Cave holds two temples fused into one: a linga shrine aligned east to west towards sunrise, and a north–south axis leading to the Sadashiva.
  • The north-facing main entrance is unusual for a Shiva temple, and its modest size conceals the scale of the hall behind it.
  • Eight guardian figures, each about 4.6 metres tall, flank the four doors of the linga shrine; only the pair at the southern door survives in good shape.
  • The wedding panel preserves an earlier version of the legend than most surviving texts, with Parvati's father giving her away and Brahma acting as priest.
  • In the Andhaka panel Shiva holds a bowl to catch the demon's blood, because every drop that touched the ground was said to spawn a new demon.
  • Cave 6, a plain hall on the eastern hill, was converted into a Christian church by the Portuguese sometime between 1534 and 1682.
  • Eighteenth-century records mention a stone horse on the island as well as the famous elephant, but it was taken away to an unknown place before 1764.
  • Most scholars now credit the caves to the Kalachuri king Krishnaraja and date their completion to the mid-sixth century.

Why it is worth it

The Elephanta Caves are cut into a small hilly island in Mumbai Harbour, some 11 km across the water from the Gateway of India. Between roughly the fifth and seventh centuries craftsmen hollowed temples out of the island's solid basalt, and the finest of them, the Great Cave, is one of the masterpieces of Indian rock-cut art. The island's local name is Gharapuri, the town of caves; Portuguese sailors renamed it after a huge stone elephant that stood near the landing place, and that elephant, broken in an attempt to ship it to England in 1864, now stands reassembled in a Mumbai garden.

The Great Cave is a pillared hall almost forty metres deep, dedicated to Shiva and laid out as a mandala, with a separate square shrine holding a linga. Its walls are lined with enormous relief panels, each several metres high, narrating Shiva's legends: his marriage to Parvati, the descent of the Ganges into his hair, Shiva as lord of dance and lord of yogis, and the half-male, half-female form of Ardhanarishvara. Facing the entrance is the colossal Sadashiva, a three-headed bust in which the calm central face is flanked by a fierce one and a gentle one — widely considered the supreme work of the whole site.

Much of the sculpture is damaged, and the island stopped being a living place of worship after the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century; the loss is often attributed to their soldiers. The British began protecting the caves in 1909, fallen pillars were restored in the 1970s, and the site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Beyond the main cave lie smaller Hindu caves and, on the eastern hill, Buddhist stupa mounds that date back to around the second century BCE, evidence that the island was sacred long before Shiva's temple was carved.

Getting there

Ferries run to the island from the Gateway of India in Mumbai; from the jetty a footpath or a small tourist train leads to about 120 steep steps up to the Great Cave. Uran on the mainland is about 10 km away, and Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMI) is about 14 km away in a straight line.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Maharashtra 7The Most Beautiful Places in India 90The Most Remarkable Rock-Cut Monuments in India 5The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Rock-Cut Monuments 6The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders in India 8The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in India 11The Most Remarkable Rock-Cut Monuments 17The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in India 26The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Elephanta Caves form a collection of cave temples predominantly dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva; UNESCO has designated them as a World Heritage Site. They are located on Elephanta Island, or Gharapuri, in Mumbai Harbour, 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) east of Mumbai in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The island, about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) west of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port, features five Hindu caves, a few Buddhist stupa mounds that date back to the 2nd century BCE, and two Buddhist caves with water tanks.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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