The caves and their inscriptions
The Barabar hills are a cluster of granite outcrops rising from the plain about twenty-five kilometres north of Gaya. Four caves were cut into the hard rock there, and three more in the neighbouring Nagarjuni hill. Short Brahmi inscriptions in three of the Barabar caves record that King Piyadasi, the name Ashoka used in his edicts, gave them to the Ajivikas in the twelfth and nineteenth years after his consecration. The Nagarjuni caves carry inscriptions of Dasharatha, Ashoka's grandson, recording that he gave them to the Ajivikas on his accession. In some inscriptions the word Ajivika was later chiselled out, perhaps by rival sects.
The Ajivikas were an ascetic movement founded or led by Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavira, who taught a strict determinism. They are known almost entirely from the hostile accounts of Buddhists and Jains, and the caves are among the few monuments that can be connected with them.
Architecture
The Sudama cave and the Karan Chaupar cave are among those dated by Ashoka's inscriptions, and the Visva Zopri, left unfinished, shows how the work proceeded. The caves are simple in plan: a rectangular hall, and in some a circular chamber at the inner end, roofed with a vault that imitates the curved roof of a thatched hut. Their interiors are polished to a mirror finish, the same high polish found on Ashoka's stone pillars, and the halls produce a strong echo. The polishing of such hard stone over large surfaces is a remarkable technical achievement.
The Lomas Rishi cave has the only decorated façade. Its entrance is carved in the form of the front of a timber building, with sloping jambs, a curved arch outlined as if in bent wood, and a frieze of elephants approaching stupas. This doorway is the earliest surviving example in stone of a form that became the standard façade of the great Buddhist chaitya halls of western India, such as Bhaja and Karla, and its carving shows that the rock-cut tradition began by translating wooden architecture into stone.
Later history
Later inscriptions show that the caves were used by other groups in later centuries, including Hindu ascetics, and the hills became associated with Shaiva worship. Medieval inscriptions of the Maukhari dynasty record the installation of images in one cave.
E. M. Forster visited the caves and used them as the model for the Marabar caves in A Passage to India (1924), where an echo heard in a cave sets off the novel's central crisis. The caves are protected by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Further reading
- Basham, A. L. History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas. Luzac, 1951
- Dehejia, Vidya. Early Buddhist Rock Temples. Cornell University Press, 1972
- Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford University Press, 1997
See also
- Ajivika — The Ajivikas were an ascetic order of ancient India holding that everything is determined by fate, once prominent enough to receive Mauryan patronage, and extinct by the medieval period.
- Ashoka — Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE) was the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, who after conquering Kalinga promoted Buddhist ethical principles across an empire spanning most of the Indian subcontinent.
- Ashokan edicts — The Ashokan edicts are inscriptions on rocks and pillars across the subcontinent issued by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, the earliest deciphered Indian writing and the earliest direct testimony of an Indian ruler.
- Buddhist rock-cut architecture — Buddhist rock-cut architecture comprises the chaitya halls and viharas excavated into the basalt of western India from the second century BCE, the earliest surviving Indian architecture of any tradition.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.