Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves

About

The Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves rise upon two neighbouring hills three kilometres south of Bhubaneswar, the capital of the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Once known as the Kattaka Gumpha or Cuttack caves, they form one of the most important early Jain monastic complexes in India and are protected as monuments of national importance.

The two hills are identified in the celebrated Hathigumpha inscription as Kumari Parvata, the venerable mountain of the maiden. Carved partly from natural rock shelters and partly through deliberate excavation, the caves were created in the first century BCE, during the reign of the Mahameghavahana king Kharavela, whose conquests and pious works are recounted in the Hathigumpha inscription itself.

Most of the caves were prepared as small dwelling cells for Jain ascetics, providing places of seclusion for meditation, study and the practice of austerities. The cells are arranged around courtyards and verandas, often with raised stone pillows where the monks slept and with finely sculpted entrances bearing the imagery of yakshas and yakshis, processions, dancers and elephants.

Udayagiri, the Hill of Sunrise, contains the more elaborate caves, including the famed Rani Gumpha or Queen's Cave with its multi-storeyed plan and richly sculpted friezes. Khandagiri preserves additional cells and an active Jain Temple at its summit dedicated to Mahavira, drawing worshippers to a site sanctified by more than two thousand years of practice.

History

King Kharavela of the Mahameghavahana dynasty excavated the earliest cells here in the first century BCE, work he recorded in the seventeen-line Hathigumpha inscription cut into the brow of the Hathigumpha cave, which recounts his campaigns and the recovery of a Jain image once carried off by a Nanda king. Eighteen caves were cut into Udayagiri and fifteen into Khandagiri, most of them simple dormitory cells for wandering monks with a stone rise at one end to serve as a pillow, though the double-storeyed Rani Gumpha and Swargapuri Manchapuri caves and the carved doorways of Barabhuji cave show far greater ambition. Worship continued at Khandagiri long after the ascetics who first carved it, and the Temple standing at its summit today, rebuilt in its present form in the early nineteenth century over an older foundation, remains active.

Significance

The Hathigumpha inscription makes Udayagiri and Khandagiri one of the earliest datable Jain sites in India and among the most important sources for the history of ancient Odisha. Where Udayagiri preserves its caves largely as archaeology, Khandagiri's summit Temple keeps the hill a place of living pilgrimage rather than a silent ruin, so that a visitor climbing from one hill to the other passes through two thousand years of continuous Jain devotion in a single ascent.

Architecture

Early Jain rock-cut monastic architecture in the Kalinga tradition; Khandagiri's summit Temple in Kalinga Pidha style with vimana and jagamohana