The Great Chaitya at Karla Is India's Largest Rock-Cut Buddhist Hall at 37.87 Metres Deep, With Wooden Roof Ribs and Gifts Recorded From Donors in Banavasi, Sopara and Dhenukakata

The Great Chaitya at Karla is the largest rock-cut prayer hall in India, according to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which measures it at 37.87 metres from door to back wall, 13.87 metres wide and 14.02 metres high. It is Cave 8 in a group of 16 excavations cut into a spur of hills in Maval taluka of Pune district, about 60 km north-west of Pune on the Pune-Mumbai highway. James Burgess noted in 1880 that the caves take the name Karle from a neighbouring village, and that they belong to Vehargaon village just to the north.

The ASI’s own account says the hall was made in the time of the Satavahanas, the dynasty that ruled much of the Deccan around the start of the Christian era. Its roof still carries wooden ribs, a stone lion pillar stands in front of it, and its walls and pillars carry inscriptions that name donors who came from as far as Banavasi, nearly 600 km to the south.

A hall on the road from the ports

The ASI places Karla on an ancient highway that joined the seaports of Kalyan and Sopara with cities inland. The caves run for nearly 100 metres along a spur on the north flank of the Indrayani valley. The survey notes that the wide, flat ground in front of the hall could have held large gatherings of Buddhists, and that Bhaja, another early cave group, lies 8 km to the south.

The survey says the whole monastic complex looks to have been planned as a single design, and it dates the monasteries from about 60 to 40 BCE to the 4th century CE. All but three of the excavations belong to the phase it calls Hinayana, the three exceptions to a Mahayana phase. The group is less elaborate than the caves at Ajanta and Ellora, the ASI writes, and yet the hall at Karla is the largest of all the chaityagrihas of India. A chaityagriha, or chaitya, is a prayer hall built around a stupa.

The inscriptions give the place an older name. Senart, who edited them for the journal Epigraphia Indica in 1902 to 1903, read it as Valuraka, the name of the village where the caves lie. The ASI writes it Veluraka.

A stone hall built like a timber one

The plan is a long apsidal hall, which means one with a rounded far end. Two rows of pillars divide it into a nave and two aisles and curve together behind the stupa, the ASI says. A stupa is a solid dome that holds a relic or marks a sacred spot, as the one at Sanchi does. The one at Karla sits on a two-stage round drum, carries a square block called a harmika and a seven-stepped inverted pyramid, and is topped by a wooden umbrella (chhatri).

Each pillar rises from a stepped base and a pot-shaped member through an octagonal shaft to a capital with animal sculptures carrying riders, in the ASI’s description. James Fergusson, the Victorian architectural historian, counted fifteen such pillars on each side and described two elephants kneeling on every capital, each carrying a man and a woman or two women. The seven pillars behind the stupa are plain octagons. Fergusson compared the hall’s plan and size to the choir of Norwich Cathedral, though the Indian hall is lower.

Over the nave runs a barrel-vaulted roof that ends in a semi-dome above the stupa, and the ASI notes that it is fitted with wooden curved ribs and lengthwise rafters. Fergusson judged the ribs almost certainly of the same date as the excavation and took them as proof that the stone vault copies a timber building whose form can no longer be traced. In the 1880 account, the wooden umbrella over the stupa was blackened by age and smoke but almost complete.

Light enters through the front. The entrance has three doorways under a gallery, and the whole end of the hall above it is open as one horseshoe-shaped window, Fergusson wrote, so that nearly all the light falls on the stupa while the aisles stay dim.

The lion pillar and the carved front

Outside, the ASI describes a free-standing lion pillar of the Ashokan type, with a sixteen-sided shaft and four lions set back to back at the top. It stands to the right of the hall, and a short stump on the left shows that a matching pillar once stood there. Karla and Kanheri are the only two chaitya halls in the western Deccan with such a pillar in front, the survey says. Burgess recorded in 1880 that a modern Shaiva shrine covers the spot where the matching pillar’s base would be. For the kind of pillar Ashoka set up, see Ashoka the Great. Fergusson judged by analogy that the Karla lions once carried a wheel, the emblem of the Buddha’s teaching, probably in metal.

The hall is entered through a screen wall with three entrances, the central one opening into the nave and the other two into the aisles. The ASI describes the front wall as decorated in two bands: a row of railing pattern, with six mithuna figures (carved couples) above it up to the lintels, and over the doorways a series of small chaitya windows that imitate the huge one. Burgess noted that in later centuries images of the Buddha and his attendants were cut into the front wall, and that the older rail carving and some inscriptions were hewn away to make room for them.

Merchants, monks and nuns from the coast to Banavasi

The ASI counts 27 individuals named in the inscriptions at Karla, from places including Vejamti (Banavasi in the north Kanara district, nearly 600 km south of Karla), Sopara (nearly 100 km to the north-west) and two towns it calls unidentified, Umehanakata and Dhenukakata. In its summary the donors included a prince of a Maharathi family, merchants and merchant guilds, monks and nuns, and lay men and women. In December 1879 the scholar Bhagwanlal Indraji copied twenty-two inscriptions at Karle for Burgess’s survey, and Senart re-read the Karle texts from inked paper impressions made in 1899.

Senart’s edition gives the verandah’s left end to a merchant (setthi) named Bhutapala from Vaijayanti, which he took to be probably the old name of Banavasi. The record calls the hall the most excellent in Jambudvipa, the Sanskrit name for the continent of which India is part. Senart read its verb as “completed” and took the record to credit Bhutapala with finishing the hall. On the right doorway a perfumer, Simhadata of Dhenukakata, is recorded as giving the door. Sthavira Indradeva, a senior monk, gave the three elephants and the rail carving beneath them. The nun Asadhamita left her gift on the belt at the base of the great arch, and another nun, Koti, mother of Ghunika, gave a rail that was made by Nandika. A monk named Bhadasama gave one of the carved pairs of figures.

A preacher named Satimita of Sopara, of the Dharmottariya school, gave a pillar. The second of his two records calls it a pillar containing relics, and Senart noted that the shorter text looks like a replacement for the first, which had been defaced. The lion pillar’s inscription names a Maharathi called Agimitranaka, son of Goti, as its donor. Senart called Maharathi an obscure term, probably an honorific title rather than a post.

The Yavana donors of Dhenukakata

Several of the donors call themselves Yavanas. Burgess glossed the word in 1881 as a Greek, probably an Indo-Bactrian, and noted that many of them were converts to Buddhism. One pillar is the gift of Sihadhaya, a Yavana from Dhenukakata. Another is recorded in the name of Dhamma, a Yavana from the same place. Senart called that reading doubtful and suggested the phrase may instead mean a Buddhist Yavana who left out his personal name. The ASI says most of the donors from Dhenukakata were Yavanas.

A carpenter, whose name Senart read as Sami, son of Venuvasa, also came from Dhenukakata, and his record says he made the opening of the cave. Senart read it as a workman’s signature and noted that it may refer to timber work in the doorway rather than to the whole door.

Where Dhenukakata lay is unsettled. Burgess in 1881 identified it with Dharanikota near Amaravati on the Krishna, once the Andhra capital. Senart wrote that it had not been identified and should be sought in the north-west, because so many Yavanas claim it. The ASI calls it unidentified.

Villages for the monks

Two rulers’ names run through the grants of villages. Ushavadata, called in his own record the son of Dinika and son-in-law of Nahapana, a Kshatrapa (satrap) ruler, gave a village, Karajika, for the monks living in the caves at Valuraka. Senart found that a later inscription renewed the gift of the same village, spelled Karajaka there, and that it came from the Satavahana king Vasishthiputra Pulumavi or possibly from Gautamiputra Satakarni; he leaned to Pulumavi. Another record is dated in the seventh year of a king whom Senart restored as Pulumavi, and in it a Maharathi named Somadeva gave a village with its taxes to the Valuraka community.

A dated record sits in a monastery cell north of the hall. In the 24th year of Pulumavi, the lay follower Harapharana, son of Setapharana, from Abulama (probably Obollah at the head of the Persian Gulf, the gazetteer suggests), gave a nine-celled hall for the community of monks from the four quarters, as the property of the Mahasamghika school, an early Buddhist monastic order. Bühler, quoted by Burgess, read both donor names as Persian. The ASI dates this inscription to 154 CE.

How old is the hall

No inscription on the hall gives its own date, and the published estimates differ. Fergusson’s text, as revised by Burgess in 1910, says the inscriptions on the hall itself do not help with dating, and that Ushavadata’s records cannot be placed earlier than about 120 CE. The reasoning is that his Nashik inscriptions carry the years 41, 42 and 45 which, if they count in the Shaka era used by the Kshatrapas, fall in 119, 120 and 123 CE. The hall was complete long before that, the 1910 volume says, and can safely be put in the century before the Christian era, possibly early in it.

Elsewhere the same volume gives about 80 BCE, from the inscriptions and literary evidence, and Burgess in 1880 wrote that the hall belonged more probably to the half century before the Christian era than to any period after it. The 1910 chapter on Nashik then adds that a comparison of pillars there points to a date after the start of the Christian era, so that Karla “may be of somewhat later date than had been previously ascribed.” The ASI’s range for the monasteries runs from about 60 to 40 BCE into the 4th century CE. The Ushavadata records give a limit of about 120 CE at the latest, and how far before that the hall was finished is a matter of judgment.

The reading of the first inscription also changed. The 1880 account quoted a reading of the great king Bhutapala and his son Agnimitra, connected to the Shunga dynasty, though it warned that Bhutapala might simply be an epithet. Senart’s re-reading of 1902 to 1903 made Bhutapala a merchant and Agnimitra a donor of the lion pillar, and the 1910 revision follows him.

A rescued screen, a photograph and a goddess’s fair

Burgess wrote in 1880 that he had reported a few years earlier that the stone screen at the front was leaning outward and in danger of falling. At Fergusson’s urging it was repaired under the district’s executive engineer, Colonel Goodfellow. Fergusson wrote that it would be a thousand pities to lose what he took to be the only original screen in India. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a print by William Johnson, a photographer active in India from 1852 to 1868, that it dates to 1855 to 1862 and describes as an early view of the entrance before restoration.

The Poona District gazetteer of 1885 records that the first building at the mouth of the great rock temple is the shrine of Ekvira, the family goddess (kuldevi) of the Koli community. An inscription on its west wall says it was built in February 1866, and local people said an older temple had stood on the same site. They also said her worship goes back much further, and could not say whether it is older than the rock temple. On the two chief days of the spring fair, 5,000 to 6,000 worshippers visited, about four-fifths of them from the Konkan.

Local people called the stupa inside the hall the throne of King Dharma, the eldest of the Pandava brothers, and the gazetteer found it in good repair, with the words Dharma Raja painted across the base of the stone cap (the tee) that crowns its dome. Those who had vowed to walk a number of circles round Ekvira’s shrine, which is cut into the hillside and cannot be circled, instead walked them round the stupa in the rock hall, where a frame with a revolving paper lantern was set up for the fair.