In the Charanandri Hills of Maharashtra, artisans spent roughly 600 to 1000 CE carving more than a hundred temples and monasteries into a basalt cliff left by the volcanic Deccan Traps, with Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain monuments side by side. Nothing was built up; everything was cut away. The Kalachuri builders centered Cave 29 on the Velaganga waterfall so monsoon water pours over a carving of Shiva, and Cave 21 places its Shiva linga in an equilateral triangle with the river goddesses Ganga and Yamuna. The Buddhist caves, 1 to 12, include multi-story monasteries for hundreds of monks, and Caves 11 and 12 record the rise of Vajrayana Buddhism in their mandalas and many-armed goddesses.

Cave 15 looks like a Buddhist monastery but holds Hindu imagery, a sign that patrons changed mid-project. Then King Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty commissioned Cave 16, the Kailasa temple, a freestanding replica of Shiva’s mountain home covering twice the area of the Parthenon, made by removing about 200,000 tons of rock. The Jain caves, 30 to 34, shrink the scale and sharpen the detail with lotus ceilings like lace. Visitors from al-Masudi in the 10th century to Niccolao Manucci, who guessed Chinese artisans built it, marveled at the site, and later iconoclasm smashed faces and limbs. When new, the whole cliff was plastered and painted in bright color.

• Polished metal mirrors or pools of water likely used to bounce sunlight deep into the carving chambers
• Cave 10, the carpenter’s cave, whose stone ceiling is carved to imitate ribbed wooden beams
• How the Kailasa builders cut trenches over 100 feet deep to isolate a rock island, then carved downward from the roof
• Why Cave 32 is called Indra Sabha after 19th century surveyors mistook Jain yakshas for the Hindu god Indra
• Records showing Aurangzeb took his family on monsoon picnics at Ellora, despite local myths that he tried to destroy Kailasa