India Photo Set 3 - Mahabalipuram Temple (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

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Spent a day touring the temples in Mahabalipuram, India. These are ancient temples and monuments built during the 7th to 9th century CE by the Pallava kings who ruled the area. The monuments largely depict scenes from the Mahabharata, the great religious book of the Hindus.

When we visited, the complex was pretty crowded - I tried to get as clean shots as possible but it was not always easy. Hope you guys enjoy them and visit this great world heritage site vicariously through this post! :)

3 different types of architecture are on display at Mahabalipuram - structural temples like the Shore Temple, built by layers of stone joined with mortar, monolithic temples that have largely been carved out of a single rock and rock face bas relief carvings.

The shore temple (Shore Temple - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), a structural construction located on the shore of the Bay of Bengal, dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu. Built around 700 CE, it was partially submerged by the 2004 tsunami. New features are still being discovered and excavated here:



A lion sculpture at the shore temple. The lion was a symbol of the Pallavas:




I'll add more monuments later as I add to this thread.

[Bouncer]

very cool

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The Pancha Ratha monuments, dedicated to the Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata. Believe it or not, these are carved from a single block of granite, representing the monolithic carvings in Mahabalipuram! These are two of the Rathas or chariots, dedicated to Arjuna and Nakula/Sahadeva respectively:

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The entrance to the Varaha temple, an example of rock cut cave architecture at Mahabalipuram:

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The final type of architecture at Mahabalipuram is the rock face bas relief carvings.

This is a bas relief carving in the Krishna Mandapam - depicting lifes from the Lord Krishna:



And last but not least, the grand daddy of all bas relief carvings - Arjuna's penance: This is a 27 m long single rock bas relief carving that is one of the great artistic achievements from that age. It depicts various events from Hindu holy texts. The whole carving was too big to fit in my 17-55 and I didn't have time to do a pano, so I took a few shots of the rock face. I will be happy to go into more detail if anyone is interested in any of the specifics of what the carvings are describing.

The image below is about a third of the entire rock face. It shows the warrior Arjuna in penance (the emaciated figure in the UL of the image) in the forest. All the birds and beasts of the forest have arrived as well, to view the miracle that is about to take place, when Arjuna is blessed with a vision of Lord Shiva.



A close up of the penance is shown below:

[Bouncer]

any idea on how long they took to complete. the details are amazing. sorry, you posted these when I was on vacation and I never really had a chance to look at them very well. amazing stuff.

[MattG]

What really blows my mind is the fact that only primitive tools were used. Hundreds/thousands of years ago the "cutting edge technology" woulda been some crude metal thing. Most of these were probably carved out by harder pieces of stones...so with that in mind, wow. :agreed:

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The shore temple was built over a period of 25 years, around 700 CE.

The Pancha Ratha monuments and the Varaha temple are a bit older, dating from around 650-680 CE. I didn't find any info on how long it took to build these, but since they are monoliths, they possibly took a pretty long time too, perhaps decades.

Arjuna's penance, the bas relief rock face carving, is also pretty old, from the early to mid 600s. Given the scope of this work, the largest bas relief carving in the world, I suspect it also took several years.

[Bouncer]

The people who made them, were they slaves like the pyramid builders in Giza? I can't imagine slaves being so skilled to carve such things.