The Kailasa temple at Ellora

Carved downward out of one rock, so no mistake could be undone

The Kailasa temple, Cave 16 at Ellora in Maharashtra, is the largest of the 34 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cave temples and monasteries strung for more than two kilometres along the basalt cliff there, and it is carved from a single rock. The carvers did not tunnel in from the front. They started at the top of the hillside and cut downward, freeing a whole Shaivite temple standing in an open court 82 by 46 metres at its base, its summit over the sanctuary 32.6 metres above the court floor. The temple stands on a moulded plinth about 8 metres high, carved with elephants and lions, beyond a two-storeyed gateway, with free-standing elephants and victory pillars in the court and galleries cut into the cliff walls around it.

There is no dedicatory inscription. Two copper-plate grants credit a king called Krishnaraja with a Shiva temple so wondrous that the gods and even its architect were astonished, and most scholars read this as Krishna I of the Rashtrakutas, who reigned from about 756 to 773. Others have argued that work began under his predecessor Dantidurga and that later kings went on extending it. The design follows the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal, built by the Chalukyas, and M. K. Dhavalikar suggested that Krishna, having beaten them, brought its architects and sculptors home with him. Working from a rate of about 4 cubic feet of rock per person per day, he reckoned that 250 labourers could have cut the temple in 5.5 years. Its greatest sculpture, the demon king Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa beneath a still and seated Shiva, may have been carved decades after the main shrine and may have given the temple its name.

A medieval Marathi legend, first found in the Katha-Kalpataru of Krishna Yajnavalki, tells how it began. A queen prayed to Shiva at Elapura to cure her husband and vowed to fast until she could see the shikhara, the crowning tower, of a temple built in thanks. The king recovered, and his architects said a temple with its shikhara would take months. One of them, Kokasa, promised the queen her shikhara within a week, and he kept the promise by carving a rock from the top down. Dhavalikar thought Kokasa may really have been the chief architect, since many 11th to 13th century inscriptions name architects of his family.

Later visitors were struck too. Khilji's troops treated it as a sight to see, and Aurangzeb called it a marvellous place for strolling that no written description could picture. Since 1983 it has been part of the Ellora Caves World Heritage Site.