Gommateshwara, Shravanabelagola
Interesting facts
- Tenth-century inscriptions on the sides of the statue are in Kannada, Tamil and Marathi, and the Marathi lines are among the oldest known writing in that language.
- The base inscription praises the Ganga king Rachamalla, who funded the work, and his general Chavundaraya, who commissioned it to fulfil his mother's wish.
- In a 2007 Times of India poll the statue was voted first among the Seven Wonders of India, with 49 percent of the votes.
- It remained the tallest Jain statue in the world until 2016.
- Visitors to the anointing ceremony have included Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951, Indira Gandhi in 1967 and 1981, and Narendra Modi in 2018.
- Besides milk and saffron, the anointing uses turmeric, rice flour, sugarcane juice, sandalwood paste and even gold and silver flowers.
- Shravanabelagola holds more than 800 inscriptions spanning over a thousand years, from about 600 to 1830.
- The nude figure is especially sacred to Digambara Jains, whose monks likewise renounce clothing.
Why it is worth it
On the bare granite dome of Vindhyagiri hill above the small town of Shravanabelagola stands a naked man seventeen metres tall, carved from a single block of stone. He is Bahubali, known here as Gommateshwara. In Jain tradition he was a son of the first tirthankara who fought his brother Bharata for the throne, won, and at the moment of victory saw the emptiness of killing a brother for worldly goods; he gave up his kingdom and stood in meditation so long that vines grew up his limbs and anthills rose around his feet. The sculptors showed exactly that: slender creepers climb his legs and wind around his arms, while the figure itself stays perfectly still, arms hanging straight at his sides in the standing posture of meditation called kayotsarga.
The statue was made around 983 CE for Chavundaraya, a minister and general of the Western Ganga dynasty, and it counts among the largest free-standing monolithic sculptures in the world. What astonishes close up is not the size but the calm. The shoulders are immensely broad, the waist narrow, the face serene, with half-closed eyes and a faint smile, and the smooth grey granite has a softness that makes it hard to believe it was cut from the living rock of the hill.
For Jains this is one of the holiest images anywhere, a picture of peace, non-violence and renunciation. Once every twelve years it is the focus of the Mahamastakabhisheka, when milk, saffron, ghee and other offerings are poured over the head and stream down the whole figure in front of huge crowds of pilgrims; the next is expected in 2030.
The ascent is part of the experience: more than six hundred steps lead up the hill to the temple enclosure at its summit. From the top the view opens over the pilgrimage town and the surrounding plain, and the effort of the climb makes the first sight of the great face all the more striking.
Getting there
Shravanabelagola lies in Hassan district, Karnataka, about 12 km from Channarayapatna and some 145 km by road from Bengaluru. The nearest airport is Mysore (MYQ), about 71 km away, though most visitors fly into Bengaluru's international airport and continue by road or train. Shravanabelagola has its own railway station, with trains from KSR Bengaluru; Hassan is the larger rail junction nearby.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Gommateshwara statue is a 57-foot (17 m) high monolithic statue of lord Bahubali on Vindhyagiri, also known as Indra-giri in the town of Shravanbelagola in the Indian state of Karnataka. Carved of a single block of granite, it is one of the tallest monolithic statues in the ancient world and one of the holiest sites in Jainism.
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