Aihole Has About 125 Temples Where Chalukya Builders Tested Temple Forms in Stone, and One of Them, the Jain Temple of Meguti, Is Dated by Its Own Inscription to 634 or 635 CE

Aihole, a village on the Malaprabha river in Bagalkot district, Karnataka, has about 125 temples in 22 groups, the district administration says, and most of them date from the 6th to the 8th century. Only one carries a date of its own. A Sanskrit inscription on the Meguti temple gives the year as Saka 556, which F. Kielhorn, editing it for the journal Epigraphia Indica, converted to 634 to 635 CE.

Dating the rest means reading how they are built, and that is where Aihole earns its reputation. India’s entry on UNESCO’s Tentative List says prototypes of 16 types of free-standing temple and four types of rock-cut shrine were developed at Badami and Aihole and reached their most mature form at Pattadakal. That entry also calls the Malaprabha valley a “cradle of Temple Architecture” and says the experiments “commenced at Aihole.” Pattadakal, downriver, holds the finished stage: see Pattadakal.

One date on a temple wall

Meguti stands on a hill above the village, and Cousens explains the name as a corruption of megudi, “the upper temple.” In 1876 J. F. Fleet described the tablet as “let into the outside of the east wall.” The inscription is in Sanskrit verse, 37 verses in all, by a poet called Ravikirti. Verse 35, in Kielhorn’s translation, says the stone mansion of Jinendra, a Jain temple, was built by Ravikirti, who had obtained the highest favour of King Satyashraya. Verse 36 says Ravikirti wrote the eulogy and founded the temple himself.

According to Kielhorn’s introduction, the poem was written while the Western Chalukya king Pulakeshin II reigned, and Ravikirti calls him his patron. The year is given in two reckonings, 3735 of the Kali age (counted from the Bharata war) and Saka 556, and both come to 634 to 635 CE. What the poem says about the king’s campaigns is in Pulakeshin II and the Chalukyas.

Ravikirti closes by claiming the fame of Kalidasa and Bharavi, two classical Sanskrit poets. Kielhorn called that “surely an exaggeration,” but ranked the poet in the front rank of court poets and praised the poet’s command of the rules of Sanskrit poetics.

Henry Cousens, who wrote the Archaeological Survey of India’s volume on Chalukyan architecture in 1926, began his tour at Aihole because it holds what he called the oldest dated structural temple in the country. Other temples there have inscriptions too, he noted, but none is dated, and their latest possible age can only be estimated from the style of the letters. On the main point the district administration agrees, calling Meguti “the only dated monument in Aihole.”

How many temples, exactly

The figure of 125 comes with a few other counts beside it. Cousens, writing in 1926, counted more than thirty temples inside the old village walls, which enclosed a space little more than 500 yards across, and many more in the fields. Besides those he listed two rock-cut temples, one Jain and one Brahmanical, and a shrine half cut from the rock and half built, on two floors.

Course slides prepared for the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University say 60 to 70 temples survive in various states of preservation. In the Archaeological Survey’s list of centrally protected monuments, Aihole falls under the Dharwad Circle and entries 1 to 59 are in the village. UNESCO’s Tentative List nomination puts forward a smaller set from Aihole: two caves, one shrine that is part cut and part built, and 12 structural temples. Karnataka Tourism says the town has over 125 temples built between the 4th and 12th centuries, a wider span than the district page gives.

Lad Khan, a hall that became a temple

Lad Khan is the standard example of the early experiments. Its plan is a pillared hall with the shrine pushed against the back wall, and a small second shrine sits on the roof over the middle of the hall. At first sight it looks like a hall into which a shrine was fitted afterwards. Cousens argued from the neighbouring Kont-Gudi temples that the arrangement is original. He wrote that its massive square pillars, flat roof and posts joined by lattice windows make it more like cave architecture than anything else at Aihole, and that cave architecture itself came from wooden forms.

The name is late. The district page says the temple is named for a Muslim prince who turned it into his home. An inscription on its front wall, in letters Cousens placed in the 8th or 9th century, records a grant to the Five Hundred, a body of Vedic scholars of Aryapura (an old name of Aihole). Cousens saw no link between it and the building, so it does not date the temple.

For the date, scholars have only style to go on, and they differ. The district page says about 450 CE. Cousens judged Lad Khan probably the oldest temple in the village and earlier than Meguti, but said he could not say by how much with any accuracy. He thought the earliest group, which includes Lad Khan and the Kont-Gudi temples, came perhaps a century and a half before Meguti. The IGNTU slides place Lad Khan and the Kont-Gudi group before the reign of Pulakeshin I, whose reign they give as 553 to 567.

Hucchimalli and the northern tower

Two kinds of tower stood at Aihole. The southern or Dravida type steps up in storeys, as the stump over Meguti’s sanctum does. The northern type, called rekha-nagara, is a curved spire. The Hucchimalli temple has a rekha-nagara tower over its sanctum, the district page says, and the vestibule in front of the sanctum “was introduced for the first time here.”

Cousens compared the Hucchimalli spire to the Parashurameshvara temple at Bhubaneswar in Odisha and judged its details more archaic than the Durga temple’s. A grant of oil to the temple’s priest, dated in the 13th year of King Vijayaditya, 708 to 709 CE, is cut on its front, so the temple was in worship by then. Cousens judged it older than Meguti on style.

Cousens also saw that the two tower types sat side by side. The builders, he wrote, seem to have had no particular reason for picking one or the other, and the buildings below the tower are alike. The Tentative List entry makes a similar point from the plans: two basic layouts, with and without a path round the shrine for walking round it, were developed in the temples of Aihole and Badami and finalised at Pattadakal. Hucchimalli, Meguti and the Durga temple, it says, belong to the type with the path.

The Durga temple and the Buddhist hall

Cousens called the Durga temple undoubtedly the finest and most imposing in the village. The district page calls it the most elaborately decorated monument in Aihole, dedicated to Vishnu, with a rekha-nagara tower, and dates it to the late 7th or early 8th century. The name has nothing to do with the goddess. Cousens writes that it comes from durga, “fort,” because the temple stands within the ruins of a fortified enclosure.

Its plan is the rare part. The Tentative List entry calls the Durga temple a rare example of an apsidal plan (rounded at the back) and says the plan adopts the Buddhist chaitya, a prayer hall with a rounded end. Cousens laid the temple’s plan beside that of Cave 19 at Ajanta, a Buddhist chaitya cave, and showed how the cave’s rock wall matches the temple’s outer ring of pillars and how the shrine takes the place of the stupa. Two rows of columns divide the hall into a central nave and side aisles, as in the cave. Ajanta is covered in Ajanta and Ellora, carved from rock.

The dating spread is wide. The IGNTU slides record Percy Brown’s date of the 6th century and Saundarajan’s of the 7th. On the dedication, Cousens held that the temple was probably first Vaishnava, possibly for Surya-Narayana, pointing to Garuda over the shrine door, though the niches around the outer verandah mix Shaiva and Vaishnava images and the central one at the back is empty.

Caves, and what came next

The experiments were not only in built stone. The district page puts the Ravanaphadi cave, a Shiva cave with a dancing Shiva, in the 6th century and says its sanctum is larger than those in the Badami caves. The Tentative List describes its plan as a pillared hall, a sanctum and two side galleries, and says the planning of the Jain Meena Basadi cave, with a sukhanasi (a small chamber in front of the sanctum) and a better defined vestibule, shows “a major step” toward the plan of built temples.

The Tentative List entry says the experimentation in Aihole’s temples led to more definite forms at Badami, Nagral and Pattadakal. It was submitted to UNESCO on 9 February 2015 under cultural criteria (iii) and (iv) and counts six rock-cut caves and 25 temples across the three sites. Karnataka Tourism calls Aihole a laboratory for temple styles later perfected at Pattadakal.

Where the sources part

Some points remain open. The district page calls Ravikirti a commander and minister of Pulakeshin II, while Kielhorn describes him as a court poet and a writer of eulogies. The same page says Meguti’s upper structure is not original and its 16-pillar porch and hall are later additions, while Cousens thought the temple was never finished. The Tentative List entry calls Aihole the first capital of the Early Chalukyas, whereas Cousens wrote only that the village may have been their first home in the south. UNESCO’s page, opened on 29 October 2026, lists the Aihole, Badami and Pattadakal entry as a Tentative List submission of 9 February 2015 and refers to Pattadakal (reference 239rev) as the property already on the World Heritage List.