heritage/ellora-jain-caves.jpg · 1200×800Ellora's thirty-four caves were cut from a single basalt escarpment by Buddhist, Hindu and Jain communities in turn. The Jain caves, numbered 30 to 34, lie at the far northern end, about a kilometre beyond the great Kailasa temple. They were excavated in the ninth and early tenth centuries, when the Rashtrakutas ruled the Deccan, and some work continued under the later Yadavas. All belong to the Digambara tradition.
Cave 30, the Chhota Kailasa, is an unfinished smaller answer to the Kailasa temple beside it, with two large reliefs of a dancing figure. Cave 32, the Indra Sabha, is the finest: two storeys around a courtyard that holds a monolithic shrine, a free-standing pillar and a carved elephant. Inside, four Tirthankaras face the cardinal directions, and the yakshi Ambika sits beneath a mango tree on her lion.
The names Indra Sabha and Jagannatha Sabha are nineteenth-century misnomers — the supposed Indra is the yaksha Matanga on his elephant. Cave 33 is the second largest, with twelve pillars and images of Parshvanatha and Mahavira; Cave 34 holds a seated Parshvanatha under a lotus ceiling. Patches of plaster and pigment show that the caves were once brightly painted. Ellora became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
