Kailasa Temple, Ellora
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The top of the shrine rises 32.6 m above the courtyard floor, and the U-shaped court cut around it measures about 82 by 46 m.
- It is Cave 16, the largest of 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cave temples and monasteries strung for more than 2 km along the Ellora cliff.
- Archaeologist M. K. Dhavalikar calculated that 250 workers each cutting about four cubic feet of rock a day could have finished the temple in some five and a half years.
- The main shrine closely follows the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal, itself modelled on the Kailasa temple at Kanchipuram, suggesting southern craftsmen worked here.
- The plinth is carved so that a frieze of elephants and lions appears to carry the entire temple on their backs.
- Its most celebrated relief shows the demon king Ravana trying to shake Mount Kailasa; scholars think it was carved decades after the main shrine.
- According to a medieval Marathi legend, the architect Kokasa promised a fasting queen she would see the temple's summit within a week, so he began carving from the top.
- Stone bridges once linked the surrounding three-storey galleries to the central shrine, but they have since collapsed.
- Even the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, notorious for destroying temples, praised it in his memoirs as a wonder that no written description could capture.
- Three of the five detached shrines in the courtyard are dedicated to the river goddesses Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati.
Why it is worth it
Most temples are built up from the ground. This one was made by removing everything around it. Carvers began at the top of a basalt cliff and worked downward and inward, cutting three deep trenches to isolate a single block of rock before shaping it into a temple from the outside in โ meaning that at no point in the process could they add material back if a cut went wrong. Every column, every stepped roofline, every carved elephant had to be right the first time, because there was no way to patch a mistake in solid stone the way you could in brick or wood.
By most estimates, somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 tons of rock were removed to expose the structure. Two inscriptions tie the temple to the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, who reigned from 756 to 773 CE, which is often used to argue the whole thing was carved in roughly eighteen years โ though a good number of scholars find that timeline implausibly fast for a monument this complex and suspect work continued, or was substantially reworked, under his successors. The inscriptions confirm who claimed credit for starting it; they don't fully settle who finished it.
The design itself is a deliberate act of translation: the temple is a stone copy of Mount Kailash, Shiva's mythical Himalayan home, rendered at courtyard scale with a life-sized carved elephant, freestanding-looking pillars, bridges, and subsidiary shrines โ all of it, including the parts that look structurally separate, cut from the same uninterrupted piece of mountain. There isn't a single joint anywhere in the main structure, because there was never a second piece of material to join.
Getting there
Located in Khuldฤbฤd. Aurangabad Airport (IXU) is about 29 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Kailasha or Kailasha-natha temple is the largest of the rock-cut Hindu temples at the Ellora Caves in Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar district of Maharashtra, India.
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