Ellora Caves

Walk into the tenth cave at Ellora and look up. The ceiling is a barrel vault made of ribs, evenly spaced and slightly curved, exactly like the timber roof of a hall. Every one of those beams is stone. They were cut out of the living rock, deliberately shaped to look like carpentry that was never there.

The reason is that halls like this really were built in wood at the time. When builders moved into rock, they kept the shape people expected and changed only the material. So what you are looking at is a photograph, in basalt, of an architecture that has otherwise completely disappeared. None of the wooden buildings survive. Their ceilings do.

Why This Particular Hillside

Ellora is in Maharashtra, on one of the basalt scarps of the Deccan plateau, and the location was a business decision. A trade route ran past it, connecting the interior of the Deccan to the ports on the west coast. Caravans went by, caravans carried money, and merchants endowed the monasteries along the road. The excavation at Ellora was funded by traffic.

There are thirty-four caves and they are not contemporaries. They were cut in overlapping phases roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries: Buddhist monastic halls and shrines at one end of the cliff, Hindu temples in the middle, Jain caves at the far end. Centuries separate them. A ten-minute walk connects them.

Building By Removal

The largest thing at Ellora was not built. It was released.

For the Kailasa temple, the work started at the top of the slope. Masons cut deep trenches around the footprint, isolating a huge block of hillside on three sides, and then began working downwards into it — spire tops first, then roofs, then columns, then floors. Everything you see there, the pillars and gateways and the elephants that appear to carry the base, came out of that single mass of rock. Nothing was added. Only removed.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. In built architecture a mistake is a stone you take back out and replace. In rock-cut architecture there is no replacing anything, ever, at any point in the years the work takes. Estimates of the spoil hauled off the site run to hundreds of thousands of tonnes.

A Relief That Shakes

Set into the base of Kailasa is a panel showing a figure who has got underneath a mountain and is pushing up at it with many arms. Above him the mountain's residents feel it: a female figure grabs at the man beside her, and he stays calm and presses down with one foot, and the mountain holds.

Whatever you make of the story, the technical move is worth noticing. To make stone convey shaking, the sculptor put the figures at different depths — the ones underneath are almost fully in the round, the ones above are shallow and close to the surface. As the sun moves the shadows change, and the panel reads differently at nine in the morning than at four in the afternoon.

There is also a persistent account that a later ruler ordered Kailasa destroyed, that the work went on for years, and that all his men managed was to break sculpture. The sources for it are argued over. What is not in doubt is that the temple is full of intact bodies with damaged faces.

Now

Ellora was never lost. Ajanta, a couple of hours away, disappeared into forest and was stumbled on again in the nineteenth century; Ellora sat beside a working road and stayed in use and in memory the entire time, described by medieval travellers passing through. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.

The threat now is the rock. Basalt is hard but porous. Monsoon water gets into fissures, and when it dries it leaves salts that lift the surface off in flakes. Add several million visitors a year, their breath, their hands, and the traffic on the road below. The stone has been eroding for a thousand years and the rate has increased in the last fifty. This is the drawback of carving a temple out of one piece of anything: when part of it fails, there is no such thing as a replacement block.