Udayagiri Near Vidisha Holds Twenty Gupta-Era Caves, a Colossal Varaha Relief and a Cave Inscription of Gupta Year 82, About 401 CE, and It Joined India's UNESCO Tentative List on 29 September 2026

Udayagiri is a sandstone hill just west of the old earthen ramparts of Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh. It holds twenty rock-cut caves, a boar-headed figure of Vishnu cut into the cliff in a niche about 22 feet long, and a cave inscription dated Gupta year 82, which works out to about 401 CE. India sent the site to UNESCO on 8 July 2026, and on 29 September 2026 it was added to India’s Tentative List, which took the country’s count to 78. A Tentative List entry is a preparatory step toward a future World Heritage nomination. It does not confer World Heritage status.

The name means “mountain of the sunrise”, as the historian Michael Willis translates it. This is not the Udayagiri near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, whose caves and Kharavela’s Hathigumpha inscription have their own article. UNESCO’s page spells the Madhya Pradesh site “Udaigiri”.

What India told UNESCO in July 2026

India’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO made the submission on 8 July 2026. It cites criteria (ii), (iii) and (iv), gives the coordinates as 23°32’11” N, 77°46’20” E, and describes a rock-cut ensemble developed mainly under Gupta patronage between the late 4th and early 5th centuries CE. Twenty excavated caves, sculptural panels, inscriptions and rock surfaces carrying early marks make up the property. Two sculptures are named as the most significant: the Varaha panel in Cave 5 and the Anantasayana Vishnu, Vishnu asleep on the serpent Ananta, in Cave 13. Inscriptions connected with Chandragupta II, Kumaragupta I, ministers and local rulers confirm elite patronage, the text adds.

Some of the submission’s claims go further than the inscriptions do. The text argues that tanks, cascades and the placing of sculptures show a designed ceremonial terrain, and that sculptures and inscriptions were aligned with celestial events. UNESCO’s page notes that sole responsibility for the content of each Tentative List lies with the State Party concerned, so these are India’s arguments, and the sections below say who has made each of them in print. Akashvani News reported the addition on 29 September 2026. The Organiser, on 1 October, described Tentative List inclusion as a preliminary stage toward a future nomination.

Cunningham numbered ten caves, and the department later counted twenty

Alexander Cunningham, the first director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, described the hill in the report on his tours of 1874 to 1875 and 1876 to 1877, published as volume X of the Survey’s reports. J. F. Fleet, who edited the Gupta inscriptions in 1888, places the first notice of the cave inscriptions in that volume, in 1880. Cunningham numbered ten caves from south to north. The Archaeological Department of Gwalior State, which looked after the hill under the Scindia rulers, later numbered twenty, and D. R. Patil’s 1948 monograph for that department sets out the numbering that Willis and later writers call the standard one. Cunningham’s No. 4, the Varaha, became Cave 5. Patil judged that only nine of the twenty show distinct architectural features, and that the rest are simple cuttings.

Fleet gives the hill’s position as about two miles (some three kilometres) north-west of Bhilsa, the modern town beside the site of ancient Vidisha, as Patil puts it. Patil adds that Udayagiri is one of several groups of ancient monuments within roughly a dozen miles of Bhilsa. Sanchi, covered in this article on its stupa, is among them, and so is Besnagar, where a Greek envoy raised the Heliodorus pillar.

Gupta year 82: the date over the door of Cave 6

Cave 6 stands near the mouth of the cleft that cuts across the hill. Its doorway carries river goddesses, and the rock face beside it is divided into panels that include a four-armed Vishnu. Over two of the figures is a smoothed rectangle with a Sanskrit inscription in prose. Fleet, working from the stone, read the date as the year 80 and 2, on the eleventh lunar day of the bright fortnight of the month of Ashadha, which falls in June and July. He converted the year to 401 to 402 CE.

The inscription records a deyadharma, a religious gift, from a maharaja of the Sanakanika family. The ruler’s own name is damaged. Fleet read the surviving letters as ending “dhala”, and the scholar D. C. Sircar’s reconstruction, Sodhala, is the one Willis uses. The text gives his father as the maharaja Vishnudasa and his grandfather as the maharaja Chhagalaga, and says he meditates on the feet of the paramount king, Chandragupta. To Fleet the cave appeared to be a Vaishnava one. Cunningham, who named it the Chandragupta Cave, noted that the Sanakanikas are also named on the Allahabad pillar of Samudragupta, whose campaigns are described in this article.

Willis, whose reading is the most recent, adds two points. First, he argues that the Sanakanikas seem to have been a family of Brahmins in royal service, not a frontier tribe as earlier writers assumed. Second, he calculates that Ashadha 82, taken as an expired year, falls in June 401, and that the eleventh day of the bright fortnight, when Vishnu is held to be put to sleep for the rainy season, fell on 9 June 401. The date is his own computation, built on that assumption about how the year was counted.

The minister who came with the king to Cave 7

A short distance from Cave 6 is the Tawa Cave, named for the flat stone on its roof that looks like a griddle. Its inscription is in five numbered verses and carries no date. Fleet and Cunningham both read it as the work of a minister of Chandragupta II named Saba, called Virasena in his family, a man of Pataliputra who knew grammar, law and logic and was a poet. The text, in Fleet’s translation, says he came here with the king, who was seeking to conquer the whole world, and out of devotion to Shambhu caused the cave to be made. Shambhu is a name of Shiva. In Fleet’s reading Virasena also held the office of arranging peace and war.

Chandragupta II rather than Chandragupta I is the king meant, Fleet argued. The letter forms resemble those of the Allahabad pillar inscription, which he says was cut in the second Chandragupta’s time, and the dated inscription of year 82 sits in the same hill. Patil, writing in 1948, read the reference to a world-conquering campaign as pointing to the war against the Shaka rulers, with eastern Malwa and Vidisha as the forward base. Chandragupta II reigned about 375 to 415 CE, by Willis’s dating.

The Varaha, cut into the rock at the water’s edge

The Puranas tell that Vishnu took the form of a boar, Varaha, and lifted the earth from the cosmic ocean. At Udayagiri the scene fills a niche that Cunningham measured at 22 feet long, a little under 13 feet high and 3 feet 4 inches deep. The god stands as a man with a boar’s head. His left foot rests on the coils of the serpent king, whose hood has thirteen heads, seven in front and six behind. With his right tusk he raises Prithvi, the earth as a small female figure, from water that the sculptor drew as long wavy lines.

Brahma, Shiva on his bull, musicians and rows of sages fill the background. On the two side walls Ganga stands on a crocodile and Yamuna on a tortoise, and a figure of the ocean stands in the water to the knees, holding a vessel. Patil noted that the Udayagiri Varaha has two arms, where the Varaha figures cut later at Badami and Mahabalipuram have four.

A point about the setting comes from Willis. A large tank lies in front of the panel, now cut off from it by a road, a wall and a gate. Crumbling stone at the base of the relief shows, he writes, that water once lapped across the figure’s feet, especially in the rainy season. On his reading the Varaha rose out of real water, as the Matsya Purana describes the incarnation.

Who is kneeling at the Varaha’s feet

Behind the serpent king is a kneeling figure, now headless. Cunningham guessed it might be the ocean king. In 1932 K. P. Jayaswal proposed that the whole panel is a political allegory of Chandragupta II as Vishnu raising the earth, drawing on verses by the playwright Vishakhadatta. Willis names the closing verses of the Mudrarakshasa as the source, and Patil and Puratattva name the Devichandraguptam. According to Willis’s survey of the literature, V. S. Agrawala was the first to name the kneeling figure as the emperor himself, and S. V. Sohoni later argued the same. Joanna Williams, in The Art of Gupta India, judged parts of Jayaswal’s reading strained. Patil, in 1948, found no direct evidence for it, because the Varaha niche carries no inscription and the inscription in the nearby cave does not support it.

A different identification comes from Willis. Because Cave 6 stands beside the Varaha and calls its donor a man who meditates on the feet of Chandragupta, he argues that the kneeling figure is the Sanakanika donor, shown honouring a king who is himself cast as Varaha. He then proposes a second meaning, that the donor’s father Vishnudasa, who served under Samudragupta, is also in view. Puratattva’s overview of the scholarship objects that the Sanakanika inscription is in a neighbouring cave, not in the Varaha niche. The question remains open, and with the head missing no portrait likeness can settle it.

The sleeping Vishnu and the sun

Cave 13 is a shallow niche at the top of the passage, holding Vishnu asleep on the coils of Ananta. The Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India page gives the figure as 3.6 metres, and Puratattva gives about 12 feet. Below the god a worshipper kneels holding a censer. Above the god are the goddess of sleep and Brahma on a lotus, then Garuda, Vishnu’s weapons in personified form, and the demons Madhu and Kaitabha. In Willis’s dating the image is of the fifth century.

His argument is that the cleft was shaped to make the sun strike this image. He writes that the north wall of the passage was left almost untouched, and the south wall was cut back in the fifth century so that the rising sun at the summer solstice, in late June, lights the figure for several days. A water cascade ran down the passage from a tank at its head. These ideas came out of discussions with Meera Dass, who has studied the hill with Willis, and Puratattva’s summary says Dass suggested that the hill served as an astronomical observatory. These are their interpretations, and the Tentative List submission takes up the same theme.

A Jain image in Cave 20, and the hill before and after the Guptas

Cave 20, high on the north-western end of the hill and reached by steep steps at the cliff edge, holds a Jain inscription dated in words to the year 106, in the month of Kartika, on the fifth day of the dark fortnight. In Fleet’s conversion the date is 425 to 426 CE, and he placed the inscription in the time of Kumaragupta, since the inscription names no king. It records that a Jain ascetic named Shankara, a pupil in the lineage of the teacher Bhadra, had an image of the Tirthankara Parshvanatha set up at the mouth of the cave. Patil called it one of the few Jain inscriptions of the Gupta age. The image is no longer in the cave, and Fleet suggested it may have been a separate carving.

Before the Guptas the hill was already a place of timekeeping, in Willis’s account, since large shell-script inscriptions on the passage wall are older than the fifth-century sculptures that cut into them. The submission to UNESCO also says the hill had significance before and after the principal Gupta phase. Patil counted twelve inscriptions on the hill in all, of which he judged four important.

Udayagiri stands on India’s Tentative List as of 2 November 2026, and none of the sources consulted for this article reports a nomination dossier.