The Ellora Monoliths

This book seeks to lift into focus the monolithic legacy of the Rashtrakutas at Ellora, from out of the reason that these monoliths perhaps are best suited to understand and reconstruct the artistic, architectural, traditional, religious and cult interactions and growth-spectra that had taken place in the period from the 8th to the 10th century A.D., very much more eloquently than the study of the cave temple types. Without the stabilizing role of these monoliths, in the over view of the status of temple art, in that period which the Rashtrakutas adorned by their vigorous patronage, eclecticism and multi-pronged political thrusts all over India in their heyday, the cave-art syndrome would tend to cloy even under the best circumstances, as something repetitive, potteries and commandeered which surely it was not. The book deals with the five monoliths at Ellora, in their own historical architectural, iconographic-religious perspectives, and elucidates how they were greatly diversified and pregnant with rich potential for the reconstruction of the are situation; and it compares them also with their compeer monoliths elsewhere in South India, in the same ilk, as in the Pallava and Pandya zones of the past. The chief aim of the book is to give a satisfactory formal picture of these monoliths and to vest them with the credit of being land-marks in the arche-types they sought to represent. Profusely illustrated and with a helpful set of charts and glossary, it is designed to cover a felt need in art studies at Ellora. About The Dr. K. V. Soundra Rajan (b.1925) took his Post-graduate degree in Sanskrit with Epigraphy form Allahabad University, and was trained and selected in 1947 by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, then Director General, Archaeological Survery of India, as scholar, and by the U.P.S.C. as an officer in 1954. Seeing service in several capacities and varying responsibilities from Prehistory to Temple Survey, he retired recently as Additional Director General in