In his latest Novel called the Ayodhya Alliance by Ashwin Sanghi he talks about the Kailasa temple!
The amount of carvings and that too intricate ones done by the artisans is simply mind blowing!
Did you know that it is a monolithic structure?
Which means that it is a single big piece of rock!
The temple is about 145 feet wide, 195 feet long and 90 feet high, which makes it bigger than twice the size of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece!
This 1300 year’s old architectural marvel is carved out of a single volcanic basaltic rock of the Charanandri hills and is considered as the largest monolithic piece of art in India as well as in the world!
By the way, that is not even the most interesting point!
The architecture of Kailasa Temple is notable for its vertical excavation, the work started at the top and moved downwards, rolling down the large boulders split from the mountain using steel rod drills. One can see the drill marks on the surrounding walls that are still visible. A megalith carved out of a single rock, the Kailasa Temple is the only structure in the world that is craved from the top to bottom!
Again that is not even the most interesting part!
Every single design and measurement was planned very accurately as once its cut there was no chance to change it by adding any extra stone or piece of rock!
The most interesting thing about this marvel of Indian Architecture is that nearly 200,000 tonnes of rock was removed to construct this monolithic structure!
No one even knows where and how this was done! It is simply amazing to even imagine! Getting so many tonnes of rock out and away with no traces of it even now can make you literally scratch your head!
Even with modern machineries and equipment and designers and professionals working round the clock may take years to even come up with a plan for this!
With all these, do you know how much time it took for this construction?
The archaeologists had calculated that it would have taken more than a hundred years to finish the temple construction. But, in reality it took only 18 years to complete it!
Everyone is trying to understand how the temple was built, cut out of the rocks, by using ancient traditional methods without using any modern technology with in that short period of time.
Now lets see what story Ashwin has come up with on how it was done! Apparently Aurangzeb who destroyed thousands of Hindu temple, also tried to destroy Kailasa temple and sent 1000 people to do it!
They worked for 3 years but they could break and disfigure a few statues only. Aurangzeb finally gave up on this task and realizing that it was impossible to completely destroy the temple as the rock was simply too hard to demolish, even though artisans used only hammers, chisels and picks to construct it!
In any case, only structures can be destroyed by vain narrow minded people! The legacy and history will stand the test of time!
That is a legacy to cherish! Legacy also is of Santeshivara Lingannaiah Bhyrappa and his amazing work!
Do check out both the temple and Bhyrappa’s works when you can!
Shubh ratri!
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