Kailasa Temple, Ellora

About

Set among the thirty-four cave shrines of Ellora in Sambhaji Nagar district of Maharashtra, the Kailasa Temple, Cave 16, stands apart for its sheer scale and ambition. The temple was not built upward in the usual manner but excavated downward and outward, hewn in its entirety from the living basalt of the hillside, leaving a freestanding shrine surrounded by carved galleries that open onto the sky.

The sanctuary rises some thirty-three metres above the courtyard floor, with the principal Shiva shrine, the Nandi mandapa before it, and victory pillars, court elephants, and a girdle of subsidiary shrines all carved in place. Vast reliefs cover its walls, including the celebrated panel of Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa, considered one of the supreme achievements of Indian sculpture, in which the demon king attempts to lift the mountain only for Parvati to take refuge in her Lord's calm strength.

The temple is conceived as the very mountain abode of Shiva translated into stone. Pilgrims and visitors who enter pass beneath gopuram gateways, encounter the great Nandi facing the sanctum, and behold scenes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Puranas carved at monumental scale across the rock.

Traces of older paintings on the cave walls speak to the layers of devotion this place has received over the centuries. Although exposed to the weather across more than a millennium, the temple remains one of the most awe-inspiring expressions of Shaiva devotion anywhere in India.

History

The Kailasa Temple lacks a dedicatory inscription, but its construction is generally attributed to the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, who reigned from about 756 to 773 CE. Two later land-grant inscriptions, the Vadodara copper plate of about 812-813 and the Kadaba grant, credit Krishnaraja with the building of a Shiva temple at Elapura, identified by scholars as the Kailasanatha at Ellora.

Some historians have suggested that the work was begun under Krishna's predecessor Dantidurga and that successive Rashtrakuta kings, including Dhruva, Govinda III, Amoghavarsha, and Krishna III, extended the temple. The Paramara ruler Bhoja is associated with the lower elephant-lion frieze, and the Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar is credited with the latest layer of paintings, in keeping with her wider patronage of Hindu pilgrimage shrines across the country.

Significance

Kailasa is regarded as the climax of the rock-cut phase of Indian architecture and a defining monument of Shaiva devotion. As an earthly Mount Kailasa, it offers the devotee a tangible vision of Shiva's transcendent abode, while standing within the wider Ellora complex, where Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sanctuaries open onto each other along the same hillside in a long witness to coexistence.