Udayagiri Caves
The Udayagiri Caves are twenty rock-cut caves near Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh primarily denoted to the Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva from the early years of the 3rd century CE to 5th century CE. They contain some of the oldest surviving Hindu temples and iconography in India. They are the only site that can be verifiably associated with a Gupta period monarch from its inscriptions. One of India's most important archaeological sites, the Udayagiri hills and its caves are protected monuments managed by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Udayagiri caves contain iconography of Hinduism and Jainism. They are notable for the ancient monumental relief sculpture of Vishnu in his incarnation as the man-boar Varaha, rescuing the earth symbolically represented by Bhudevi clinging to the boar's tusk as described in Hindu mythology. The site has important inscriptions of the Gupta dynasty belonging to the reigns of Chandragupta II and Kumaragupta I. In addition to these, Udayagiri has a series of rock-shelters and petroglyphs, ruined buildings, inscriptions, water systems, fortifications and habitation mounds, all of which remain a subject of continuing archaeological studies. The Udayagiri Caves complex consists of twenty caves, of which one is dedicated to Jainism and all others to Hinduism. The Jain cave is notable for one of the oldest known Jaina inscriptions from 425 CE, while the Hindu caves feature inscriptions from 401 CE.
There are a number of places in India with the same name, the most notable being the mountain called Udayagiri at Rajgir in Bihar and the Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Odisha.
Etymology
Udayagiri, means the 'sunrise mountain'. The region of Udayagiri and Vidisha was a Buddhist and Bhagavata site by the 2nd century BCE as evidenced by the stupas of Sanchi and the Heliodorus pillar. While the Heliodorus pillar has been preserved, others have survived in ruins. Buddhism was prominent in Sanchi, near Udayagiri, in the last centuries of the 1st millennium BCE. According to Dass and Willis, recent archaeological evidence such as the Udayagiri Lion Capital suggests that there was a Sun Temple at Udayagiri. The Surya tradition in Udayagiri dates at least from the 2nd century BCE, and possibly one that predated the arrival of Buddhism. It is this tradition that gives it the 'sunrise mountain' name.The town is referred to as Udaygiri or Udaigiri in some texts. The site is also referred to as Visnupadagiri, as in inscriptions at the site. The term means the hill at 'the feet of Vishnu'.
Location
Udayagiri Caves are set in two low hills near Betwa River, on the banks of its tributary Bes River. This is an isolated ridge about long, running from southeast to northwest, rising to about height. The hill is rocky and consists of horizontal layers of white sandstone, a material common in the region. They are about west of the town of Vidisha, about northeast of the Buddhist site of Sanchi, and northeast of Bhopal. The site is connected to the capital Bhopal by a highway. Bhopal is the nearest major railway station and airport with regular services.Udayagiri is slightly north of the current Tropic of Cancer, but over a millennium ago it would have been nearer and directly on it. Udayagiri residents must have seen the sun directly overhead on the Summer solstice day, and this likely played a role in the sacred of this site for the Hindus.
History
The site at Udayagiri Caves was the patronage of Chandragupta II, who is widely accepted by scholars to have ruled the Gupta Empire in central India between c. 380-414 CE. The Udayagiri Caves were created in final decades of the 4th century, and consecrated in 401 CE. This is based on three inscriptions:- A post-consecration Sanskrit inscription in Cave 6 by a Vaishnava minister, the inscription mentions Chandragupta II and "year 82". This is sometimes referred to as the "inscription in Chandragupta cave" or the "Chandragupta inscription of Udayagiri".
- A Shaiva devotee's Sanskrit inscription on the back wall of Cave 7, which does not mention a date but the information therein suggests it too is from 5th-century.
- A Sanskrit inscription in Cave 20 by a Jainism devotee dated 425 CE. This is sometimes referred to as the "Kumaragupta inscription of Udayagiri".
These inscriptions are not isolated. There are a number of additional stone inscriptions elsewhere at the Udayagiri site and nearby which mention court officials and Chandragupta II. Further the site also contains inscriptions from later centuries providing a firm floruit for historical events, religious beliefs and the development of Indian script. For example, a Sanskrit inscription found on the left pillar at the entrance of Cave 19 states a date of Vikrama 1093, mentions the word Visnupada, states that this temple that was made by Chandragupta, and its script is Nagari both for alphabet and numerals. Many of the early inscriptions in this region is in Sankha Lipi, yet to be deciphered in a way that a majority of scholars would accept it.
Archaeological excavations of the 20th century on mounds between Vidisha rampart and Udayagiri have yielded evidence that suggests that Udayagiri and Vidisha formed a contiguous human settlement zone in the ancient times. Udayagiri hills would have been the suburb of Vidisha located near the confluence of two rivers The Udayagiri Caves are likely euphemistically mentioned in Kalidasa text Meghduta in section 1.25 as the "Silavesma on the Nicaih hill", or the pleasure spot of Vidisha elites on the caves filled hill.
Between the 5th century and the 12th century, the Udayagiri site remained important to Hindu pilgrims as sacred geography. This is evidenced by a number of inscriptions in scripts that have been deciphered. Some inscriptions between the 9th and the 12th centuries, for example, mention land grants to the temple, an ancient tradition that provided resources for the maintenance and operation of significant temples. These do not mention famous kings. Some of these inscriptions mention grant from people who may have been regional chiefs, while others read like common people who cannot be traced to any text or other inscriptions in Central India. One Sanskrit inscription, for example, is a pilgrim named Damodara's record from 1179 CE who made a donation to the temple.
Delhi Iron Pillar
Some historians have suggested that the iron pillar in the courtyard of Quwwat-ul-Islam at the Qutb Minar site in Delhi originally stood at Udayagiri. The Delhi pillar is accepted by most scholars as one brought to Delhi from another distant site in India, but scholars do not agree on which site or when this relocation happened. If the Udayagiri source proposal is true, this implies that the site was targeted, artifacts damaged and removed during an invasion of the region by Delhi Sultanate armies in or about the early 13th-century, possibly those of Sultan named Iltutmish. This theory is based on multiple pieces of evidence such as the closeness of its design and style with pillars found in Udayagiri-Vidisha region, the images found on Gupta era coins, the lack of evidence for alternate sites so far proposed, the claims in Persian made by Muslim court historians of Delhi Sultanate about the loot brought to Delhi after invasions particularly related to the pillar and Quwwat-ul-Islam, and particularly the Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script on the Delhi Iron Pillar which mentions a Chandra's devotion to Vishnu, and it being installed in Visnupadagiri. These proposals state that this Visnupadagiri is best interpreted as Udayagiri around 400 CE.Archaeological scholarship
The Udayagiri Caves were first studied in depth and reported by Alexander Cunningham in the 1870s. His site and iconography-related report appeared in Volume 10 of Tour Reports published by the Archaeological Survey of India, while the inscriptions and drawings of the Lion Capital at the site appeared in Volume 1 of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicum. His comments that Udayagiri is an exclusively Hinduism and Jainism-related site, it being close to the Buddhist site of Sanchi and the Bhagavata-related Heliodorus pillar, and his dating parts of the site to between 2nd century BCE and early 5th century CE brought it to scholarly attention.The early Udayagiri Caves reports appealed to the prevailing conjecture about the rise and fall of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent, the hypothesis that Buddhist art predated Hindu and Jaina arts, and that Hindus may have built their monuments by reusing Buddhist ones or on top of Buddhist ones. Cunningham presumed that the broken Lion Capital at the Udayagiri Caves may be an evidence for these, and he categorized Udayagiri as originally a Buddhist site converted into a Hindu and Jaina one by "Brahmanical prosecutors". However, nothing in or around the cave looked Buddhist, no Buddhist inscriptions or texts supported this, and it did not explain why these "Brahmanical prosecutors" did not demolish the nearby bigger Sanchi site. The working hypothesis then became that the Lion Capital platform stood on a Buddhist stupa, and that if excavations were done in and around the Udayagiri Caves hills then the evidence will emerge. Such an excavation was completed and reported by archaeologists Lake and Bhandarkar in early 1910s. No evidence was found. Bhandarkar, a strong proponent of the 'Buddhist converted to Hindu' site hypothesis, went further with excavations. He, state Dass and Willis, went so far as "to ransack the platform" at the Udayagiri Caves site, in an effort "to find the stupa he was certain lay below". However, after an exhaustive search, his team failed to find anything underneath the platform or nearby that was even vaguely Buddhist.
The archaeological excavations in the 1910s in the area of the nearby Heliodorus pillar yielded unexpected results, such as the inscription of Heliodorus, which confirmed that Vāsudeva and Bhagavatism were influential by the 2nd century BCE, and which linked the Udayagiri-Besnagar-Vidisha region politically and religiously to the ancient Indo-Greek capital of Taxila.
In the 1960s, a team led by archaeologist Khare revisited a broader region, at seven mounds, which included the nearby Besnagar and Vidisha. The excavation data and results were never published, except for summaries in 1964 and 1965. No new evidence was found, but the layers excavated suggested that the site was a significant town already by 6th-century BCE, and likely a major city by the 3rd-century BCE.
Michael Willis – an archaeologist and Curator of early South Asian collections at the British Museum, and other scholars revisited the site in the early 2000s. Once again no Buddhist evidence was found at the Udayagiri Caves, but more artifacts related to Hinduism and Jainism. According to Julia Shaw, the evidence collected so far has led to a "major revision" about presumptions about the Udayagiri Caves archaeological site as well as the wider archaeological landscape of this region. Willis and team have proposed that, perhaps Udayagiri was a Hindu and Jaina site all along, and that the evidence collected so far suggests that the Saura tradition of Hinduism may have preceded the arrival of Buddhism in this region.
Many of the artifacts found in the area are now located in the Gwalior Fort Archaeological Museum.