I would like to suggest a very simple experiment. The next time you meet any friend, relative or acquaintance, man or woman; boy or girl; young or old; science stream or humanities; employed or unemployed; ask him a question, “What do they know about the Kailasnath Temple at Ellora?” Chances are, except for students preparing for civil services, most of the people would not have even heard of this wonder of wonders, in spite of the fact that it has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, and for which every scientist in the world accepts that such a structure neither exists anywhere on the planet nor it can be made even now with the most modern technology also.
How did we reach such a state of despicable ignorance about our glorious heritage? As we shall see towards the end of this article, it is because of just one man, Nehru. However, we shall first amaze ourselves with this engineering wonder.
What Are Rock-Cut Temples?
Most of you are familiar with how most of the modern structures including temples are usually made? They are made literally brick-by-brick or stone by stone, as the case could be. Usually, you first make a two-dimensional design of the structure on paper and then start constructing from the bottom, that is, the foundation, finishing at the top.
Rock-cut temples are made in exactly the opposite way. No bricks or pieces of stone are used in it and there is no foundation. You first find a gigantic piece of solid rock embedded solid on the ground. Then you visualize a three-dimensional design of the structure hidden inside the rock. That in itself is an extremely difficult task. Then you start carving or cutting the rock from the top downwards. Your structure emerges from it as you carve.
You do not use any single brick or piece of stone from outside. No mortar or cement etc. is used and there is not a single joint anywhere. To facilitate your understanding, you can think of them like huge statues carved out of rocks. However, there is a crucial difference. Statues that are carved out of rocks are completely solid structures. When they made rock cut temples, they have huge empty spaces like rooms and halls in them. Now that would give you some idea of the sheer enormity of the task.
Why It Is Almost Impossibly Difficult To Make Them?
Imagine cutting rock so carefully so as not to break it anywhere, making elaborate carvings on the walls and so on. Even visualizing a three-dimensional image of the structure in your mind or on paper is so difficult. Try it with a piece of rock a cubic metre in size with any modern tool you can lay your hands one and you will find that that you will invariably break it somewhere. You have to be extremely careful in selecting the rock and cutting it because if you happen to strike a natural fault-line in the rock anywhere at any time, the rock would fracture from there and spoil your hard labour of years in an instant.
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Give it as an engineering challenge to the best firms in business in the world and take my word, they would not even accept it. They know that whatever technique you use; such as, diamond cutting, explosives, drilling machines, water jet, laser, flaming or CNC machining; you will not be able to materialize a huge temple with ample hollow spaces from a solid rock. You would be able to cut a few blocks or give shape to them with these machines and techniques; but, making a hollowed out temple, no way!
Considering the near impossibility of constructing something this way, there are many people in the world who believe that perhaps visitors from outer space with some unknown technology must have made it. The History Channel also made a program ‘Ancient Aliens: The Ellora Caves’ suggesting this.
Dr. Binod Bihari Satpathy and the Indian National Academy of Science have calculated that nearly 50 million tons of rock must have been excavated and cut for this temple complex. Please reflect on this gigantic figure again. Nobody knows what tools or technology they had. But, one thing is certain. This could not have been done by chisel and hammer or sheer manpower. No way! Even if you deploy a man at every square foot of the complex, chisel and hammer could not do that in thousand years also. It had to be some other technology now lost to us.
Yet, the fact is that they somehow did it. Hindus must take eternal pride in this impossible achievement of their not-too-distant ancestors. Moreover, while the cutting of this enormous amount of rock must have generated an equally enormous amount of rubble, there is absolutely no rubble to be found within even a few hundred miles of the complex. Nobody knows what happened to it.
Now just think, if ancient Hindus could accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, what technology they must have possessed? And please note, the Kailasnath temple is not the only rock-cut temple in our country; we have them in Barabar Hills, Nagarjuni Hills, Badami, Elephanta caves, Mahabalipuram, Kondana, Pitalkhora, Karla and Junagadh also. How many Hindus are even aware of these wonders?
The Wonder That Is Kailasnath Temple
It is universally accepted by scientists that this is the greatest monolithic rock structure in the whole world. Imagine a nine storeys high gigantic rock of the size of a football field in a hill. From this is carved out a whole temple complex. There are a total of 34 caves carved, which house 12 Buddhist, 17 Hindu and five Jain temples. These caves have been carved out of the near-vertical basalt cliffs of the Sahyadri Hills.
The Kailasnath temple is in the 16th cave in a court which is 82 metres by 46 metres in size and the scarp of the hill in the rear is 32 metres high. Let these figures sink in. Most historians agree that the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I started it in the 8th century and it was completed by others may be in about a hundred years.
Because the colour of the stone was greyish, the entire temple complex was coated with white Gesso (Gypsum), which gave it a unique sheen and made it stand out against the background.
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It would require a separate article to describe all the statues and carvings that exist within the complex. UNESCO maintains that in terms of sculptures and carvings perhaps no temple in India can match this. Here, I can only mention that the main Mandap of the temple housing the principal deity, the Shiv Ling, stands on 16 pillars. The shikhar of the temple is 30 metres high. Then there are five minor temples including three temples devoted to three holy rivers, namely, Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. In the main courtyard, there are two huge 45 feet tall flag poles (Dhwaj Stambha). The principal sculpture of the complex depicts Ravan trying to lift Kailas Parvat, the abode of Bhagwan Shiv. There are life-size statues of elephants, a main element of the armies of the Rashtrakutas. The Sabha Mandap has some exquisite paintings. Those who are interested can read details of the sculptures and carvings etc at Kailasa: The Majestic Temple of Ellora.
Finally, keep in mind that all this was accomplished some 1,200 years ago!
What Drove Them to Undertake Such Difficult Tasks
Some people may perhaps be tempted to ask as why ancient Hindus felt compelled to undertake such difficult tasks when extremely beautiful temples could also be built by the conventional methods, that is, brick-by-brick? The answer is philosophical. A temple for the ancient Hindus was not just a place of worship by multitudes of devotees. A temple was also their offering to Bhagwan as a proof of their devotion. And, to Bhagwan, they felt compelled to offer their very best. That is why; they felt it necessary that the epitome of their engineering, architectural, sculptural and artistic skills were employed in the construction of temples. Precisely for this reason, some of the greatest pieces of ancient Hindu literature are those devoted to the praise of Bhagwan and not in poetry, drama, etc produced for the sake of literary merit per se. It is also possible that the ancient Hindus wanted to leave these imperishable proofs of their great technological for the sake of posterity. The structures were so formidable that the invaders, who loved to destroy temples, did not even dare to waste their energies on them.
Nehru’s Injustice to the Glorious Heritage of the Hindus
Think from a technical perspective and you will be convinced that the pyramids of Egypt are nothing but shabby mounds before this exquisite marvel. It is a matter of eternal shame that our youth are so blissfully ignorant about this marvel of engineering and architecture. They know about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is actually a failed engineering design, but not this.
Many of you, particularly those dreaming of migrating to the USA, might have read about the heads of four American presidents, carved (1927-41) in a hill at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. For your information, these heads are just 60 feet tall. Compare them with the gigantic structure carved out of rock 1,200 years ago in Ellora and you would find that the Mount Rushmore memorial is not even child’s play before it. Our students are taught about the architecture of Mughal era buildings at length but are never told that the difference in the engineering, architectural and sculptural skills of the two is so outrageously great that even to talk of any comparison is ridiculous.
After independence, Nehru presided over the focal area of education and he methodically downplayed the intellectual achievements of ancient Hindus, determined to project them as primitive or regressive, and an impediment to the progress of his vision of ‘modern India’. Although Nehru’s negative attitude towards Hinduism is well-known through his stand on the Hindu Code Bill, and government control of Hindu temples, etc, it would be worthwhile to know what scholars thought of him.
Acharya J. B. Kriplani had opposed the Hindu Code Bill on the ground that legislating only for Hindus, such as not touching the Muslims in the matter of polygamy, was discriminatory. Raja Rao, the author of ‘The Meaning of India’, writes about his meeting Nehru in Germany where, when he asked, “You certainly believe in something, Panditji? In some form of Deity, in philosophy?” Nehru answered angrily, “Deity, what Deity? Why Siva and Parvati, Sri Krishna! Three thousand years of that and where’s that got us—slavery, poverty.” This is ridiculous. As if people of other religions had never been poor or subjugated by people of other religions, or that religious devotion of the Hindus was single-handedly responsible for the fate that befell them at the hands of the invaders. Martha C. Nussbaum, American philosopher and professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, says that Nehru had a disdain for religion in general and Hinduism in particular. Historian Sita Ram Goel calls him ‘a bloated Brown Sahib who distrusted Hindus and Hinduism’. In his yearning for modernity or whatever his notion of it was, he rejected the ancient Hindu past as dead wood. For keeping generations of Hindus ignorant of their glorious heritage, Nehru can never be pardoned.
