Udayagiri and Khandagiri

The caves

The two hills hold some thirty-three excavations between them, most of them small cells with low ceilings, cut as shelters for mendicants rather than as temples. Several have carved facades with pilasters, arched doorways and friezes of figures, animals and processions.

Rani Gumpha, the queen's cave on Udayagiri, is the largest and most elaborate, a two-storeyed excavation around a courtyard with narrative reliefs along the upper register. Hathigumpha, the elephant cave, is plainer but carries the inscription that makes the site historically important.

The Hathigumpha inscription

Seventeen lines in Prakrit and Brahmi, cut into the overhanging brow of the cave, give a year-by-year account of the reign of Kharavela, king of Kalinga: his education, accession, public works, campaigns and religious endowments, including the recovery of a Jain image earlier carried off by a Nanda king.

It is one of the few first-person royal records surviving from the period, and one of the earliest documents of royal patronage of Jainism. Its damaged date formula has left Kharavela's period disputed across roughly two centuries.

Significance

The caves are the principal material evidence for early Jainism in eastern India, a region where the tradition later declined almost to nothing. Their austerity — cells too low to stand in, with stone pillows cut into the floor — matches what the texts describe of mendicant life more directly than any later Jain building does.