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Ancient Pallava Caves near Chennai – Mandagapattu Cave Temple
This is a guest post from Lakshmi Sharath, who will be a writing about less known heritage sites on India Travel Blog in the coming days.
When Arun asked me to post on some of the lesser known monuments that I had visited, Mandagapattu was the first that came to my mind. A humble rock cut cave temple, this was the first ever prototype built by the Pallavas under Mahendravarman 1, long before the internationally renowned Mahabalipuram was built.
This trip, like many others was planned at the last minute. I was in Chennai (Madras) where the idea of exploring ancient Pallava cave temples was floated around. We decided on an impulse and hit the road. A couple of hours later, we were cruising through lush fields, but the landscape dramatically changed to rocky outcrops and boulders. We had just crossed the fort town of Ginjee , when we took a detour. A small rusty board brought our car to a sudden halt. The hill seemed to open out to us, as we walked through the narrow opening to reach our destination – the cave temple at Mandagapattu carved out of a 100 feet hillock.
To the uninitiated, it looked like just another barren shrine, carved in a piece of rock. A flight of steps led to the cave temple, carved for the trinity, flanked by the door guardians or the dwarapalakas. The shrines were empty. But as I read the inscription, I realized that I was at a 7th century cave temple, the first of many to come.
The temple in the inscription is referred to as Lakshita Yathaanam . And Mahendravarman declares that he is not building the temple from any perishable material – brick, wood, metal and limestone or stucco. I also learnt that the early Pallava style was neither bold in their depiction of dwarapalakas, nor did they have too many embellishments in the form of relief sculptures. However their style slowly evolved as they moved on to structural temples like the ones in Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram.
We walked around the shrine and found an ancient well, where we sat for a while, listening to the sounds of silence, as the sun set though the rocks.
This post was written by Lakshmi Sharath for AffordableCallingCards.net, which offers long distance calling cards, such as India phone cards.