Aihole

The site

Aihole lies about thirty kilometres from Badami, the Chalukya capital, and a short distance up the Malaprabha from Pattadakal. Scattered through the village and its fields are more than a hundred temples and shrines, many of them grouped in clusters. They span several centuries and include Hindu, Jain and a few Buddhist monuments. Because so many early experiments survive here together, Aihole has often been described as a cradle of the Indian stone temple, though the dates of its earliest buildings have been much revised.

The temples

The Lad Khan temple, named after a man who once lived in it, is a low, square hall with a flat roof of stone slabs and a small shrine against its back wall. It was once dated to the fifth century and treated as the earliest temple of the series; most scholars now place it in the late seventh or early eighth century and see its form as a deliberate archaism or as derived from timber halls.

The Durga temple, whose name comes from a nearby fort, durga, rather than the goddess, is the most famous. It has an apsidal plan, rounded at the rear like a Buddhist chaitya hall, with a colonnaded passage running round the outside and a curved northern tower over the shrine. Its walls carry fine sculpture of Shiva, Vishnu in several forms, and the goddess killing the buffalo demon. It is usually dated to the late seventh or early eighth century.

Other temples show the range of what Chalukya builders were trying: the Huchimalligudi with an early shikhara, the Ravana Phadi, a cave temple with large figures of dancing Shiva and the river goddesses, and temples in both the northern and southern modes that anticipate the mixture at Pattadakal.

Ravikirti's inscription

On a low hill above the village stands the Meguti, a Jain temple built in 634–35 by Ravikirti, a poet at the court of Pulakeshin II. Its wall carries his Sanskrit inscription, a long eulogy of the king. It recounts the dynasty's rise and Pulakeshin's victories, including his defeat of the north Indian emperor Harsha, which is the main evidence for that event, and his wars with the Pallavas. Near its end Ravikirti claims fame equal to that of Kalidasa and Bharavi. That line gives a firm latest date for both poets and is among the most cited lines in the history of Sanskrit literature.

The guild

Aihole, under its old name Ayyavole, was the home of the merchant body known as the Five Hundred Svamis of Ayyavole, the Ainnurruvar in Tamil. From about the ninth century this guild operated across south India and overseas, and its inscriptions are found from the Deccan to Sri Lanka and Sumatra. Its members claimed descent from the Brahmins of Aihole and treated the town as their origin, though the guild's activity reached far beyond it.

Study

The temples were studied from the nineteenth century by colonial archaeologists such as James Burgess and Henry Cousens, and in the twentieth by scholars including George Michell and Michael Meister, whose reassessments of dating changed the picture of early temple history. The village grew up among the monuments, and some temples were used as houses until the twentieth century.