Temples: History, Architecture & Distribution - 2

[Bharatvarsh2]

The State of Ellora



When you finish the last leg of journey after the Daulatabad fort, you don’t realize that you’ve actually arrived at the site of Ellora caves. Parking is chaotic. The parking lot is untarred, uneven, and the ground beneath your feet/car is dented and potholed. And it suffers from the same, permanent illness that most pathetically-maintained historical sites suffer. The government staff who gives the parking ticket is in cahoots with auto drivers, “tourist guides,” and assorted wheeler-dealers. As he tears the ticket, he’ll “suggest” some “recommended” tourist guides and “knowledgeable” auto drivers who’ll size you up first and quote rates accordingly.



As magnificient as the Kailasanath temple is, its upkeep and crowd management is thrown to the winds compared to Ajanta where only 20 (?) people are allowed in a cave at a time. As a result, you witness a sea of human chaos, hear an incredible cacophony of loud, jostling and rude people, and equally, witness people spitting at will inside the temple complex. A large ASI board stands perfunctorily outside the cave describing it and declaring it as a UNESCO heritage site but that’s it.



Given the 3-kilometre expanse of Ellora caves, we are shocked by the utter apathy–barely-tarred roads connecting each cave, no guides/guards, no signboards, and some stretches are almost gutter-like. Along a few stretches of these caves, I sensed an air of incredible desolation, an almost weeping plea to save them.



Exhibit 1:







Apart from the ticket-tearing guard at the entrance of the Kailasnath temple, none of the other caves have anybody to even look over them. Here’s an instance. Notice the superbly-done Nandi sculpture.







You can walk around and sit on the Nandi and consume liquor or indulge in any similar activity, not a soul will question you. You can stamp on it with your foot and get away with pretty much any desecration your mind comes up with. This is largely true for most of Ellora except perhaps Kailasanath. Which brings us to the rows upon rows of mutilated temples, sculptures, and idols. Here are two good examples.











These are the mother Goddesses, their heads, and limbs chopped off. A casual glimpse at history tell us that Aurangzeb,



In 1690 AD . ordered destruction of temples at Ellora, Trimbakeshwar, Narasinghpur, and Pandharpur.



Our benevolent government today is simply carrying forward Aurangzeb’s torch by a more effective method: neglect, and allowing it to decay. This story is repeated in the nearby Grishneshwar where you need to first pay a kind of obeisance to the mini-mosque that towers over the Shiva (Grishneshwar is one of the names of Lord Shiva) temple. Even to the untrained eye, this comparison reveals an obvious truth.



See this first and observe the areas right at the bottom of the picture.







Now see this.







The items I pointed to in the first image clearly shows a chakra/wheel and the other a shankha/conch, both part of the Sanatana Dharma milieu. The second image shows a mosque. The chakra and shankha are located near the base of the mosque. Additionally, the overall architectural style clearly shows that apart from the standard dome, pretty much most of this mosque resembles more a Hindu structure than an Islamic one. I leave it to your intelligence to figure what happened.



And this is a wholly insignificant mosque is but another clear revelation of the character of Nehru’s court historians.



Concluding Notes



At the end of this rather tedious exercise, some conclusions are inescapable. The reason for the stellar maintenance of Ajanta caves owes a lot to the Buddhist lobby, whose power is perhaps not known widely enough. A good pointer is the way Sanchi is preserved–actually a hundredfold better than Ajanta. Check this news item from last year to know the extent of mischief whose result, needless to say, will further weaken Hindus. Additionally, the so-called revival of the Nalanda university under the aegis of Dr. Expert-on-Everything Amartya Sen is purely a political gambit in the name of Buddhism. And yet, none of these worthies talk about the industrial scale extermination of Buddhists at the hands of Islamic butchers, the same yardstick they apply in whitewashing Islamic destruction of Hindu temples.



This one-upmanship game is one of the chief reasons why Hindu monuments continue to languish this horribly. The other reason though is the near-complete deracination of Hindus. As I mentioned in the opening part, Ellora is simply another drop in the sea of similar monuments across the country. Take any state, city, town and village: the two magnificient Hoysala temples in Nagalapura village (in Karnataka) are orphaned but for a moronic ASI signboard. The state of most of the grand temples in Tamil Nadu evokes tears of blood.



Modern day Hindus throng a street-corner Sai Baba or Ganesh or Hanuman temple than give a few minutes thought to revive active worship/pooja in places like the Kailasanath temple. That one change will automatically ensure simple things–like preventing people from wearing footwear when they enter the Kailasanath temple–no law or security guard will be necessary then. The other area where urgent change is necessary is the braindead policy of our government, which treats these monument-temples as tourist places not dissimilar to a zoo or aquarium or museum or art gallery. But the reason all these won’t happen in a hurry brings us back to the same square: lack of a unified Hindu political voice, which in turn is because Hindus are terribly splintered, which in turn, is because we’re deracinated….you get the drift.



http://www.sandeepweb.com/2010/05/01/aja...ent-359347