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MONUMENTS & SCULPTURE A.D. 600 TO 1000
(PART IY
and conventionalized poses and styles, could not all be so well-oxocuted. They Jaina monuments were on the whole, excel in their richly-carved details, perfected finish, particularly in the variety of pillars, and indicate a greater procision and accuracy in the cutting, though the plan, in spite of the beauty of em. bellishment, lacks pre-determination and appears haphazard or improvised in nature. Yet, with their extant paintings of a classical nature they form an important group in the artistic heritage of India.
ROCK-CUT TEMPLES
Side by side with the cutting in of the cave-temples, which had nearly a millennium-old tradition in the Deccan and elsewhere and which would, at best, reproduce the interior and façade aspects of contemporary brick-and-timber structures, complete vimana-forms, exhibiting both the interior and exterior aspects, also came to be carved though not in such numbers as the cave-temples. It was Pallava Narasimhavarman I Mamalla (630-668) who initiated the mode of cutting out of live rock-temples forms of diverse plans and rise as exemplified by the so-called rathas of Mahabalipuram, all in the hard local granitic gneiss. The carving of such temple-forms proceeded from the top down to the base to reproduce all the external features of the original model and subsequently cut into for reproducing the aspects of the mandapa and shrine-interiors. In the Pallava country and farther south, this led ultimately to the construction of structural stone temples. The contemporary Badami Calukyas, however, skipped this stage of monolithic copies of brick-and-timber originals and produced structural temples by building up with sandstone blocks which could be easily quarried. But since this monolithic forms was quite a novel idea, it soon caught up with contemporary and later dynasties and regions and gave rise to such productions of the Pāndyas as the Vettuvankovil in Tirunelveli District, the Vengi CAļukyas and Telugu Colas in the Vijayawada, Undavalli and Bhairavakonda replicas and miniatures. It even travelled beyond to Dhamnar, District Mandasor, Masrur, District Kangra, Gwalior (Caturbhujaji temple) and Colgong, District Bhagalpur. The germ of the idea apparently lies in the carved-out stūpas inside the rock-cut Buddhist caitya-halls of western India and the imperfect vimäna-form found in the Tawā 'cave of Udaigiri, District Vidisha--a more or less circular monolithic temple-form of Gupta times, hewn out of an isolated sandstone rock-mass into a hemisphere on a base and surmounted by a large flat stone like a tawd or disc.
In the Deccan it was the Rästraköțas, who, even after the inception of structural temples in stone by the Cāļukyas, their predecessors, and their own
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