Rashtrakuta, 8th century
Pataleshwar Caves
पाताळेश्वर लेणी
A whole temple cut downward out of one sheet of Deccan basalt, twelve hundred years ago, when this was not Pune yet but the village of Bhamburda. Ten minutes from JM Road, and most Punekars have never been inside.
You walk in off a busy road and the noise stops. In front of you is a courtyard with a circular pavilion at its centre — and then you realise that the pavilion, the courtyard, the pillars and the shrine were not built. They were excavated, carved downward and inward out of a single mass of rock, in the 8th century CE.
The Rashtrakutas who made it were the same dynasty behind Ellora. Here they worked on a smaller scale and, it turns out, never finished: walk the circumambulation path and you meet a wall of raw, roughly chiselled stone where the chisels simply stopped.
Why the rock matters
Pune sits on Deccan trap basalt — the cooled remains of lava flows that covered western India. That rock is even-grained enough to carve and hard enough to last, which is why this region has been cutting temples out of hillsides since the 2nd century BCE.
We look at the Nandi pavilion and its umbrella roof, the twelve outer pillars, the ring cistern that once held water around the bull, the two stone tigers on the steps, and the three cells of the main shrine. And we read the later history too — Bajirao II's 1810 donation to Bhuyaratil Mahadev, the temple full of Gosavis in 1882, the drawing James Wales made of "Pandoo's cave" in the 1790s.
On this walk
- The in-situ rock-cut Nandi pavilion and its umbrella roof
- The 96-foot facade, eight free-standing pillars and stone tigers
- The unfinished rock face — chisel marks left mid-stroke
- Deccan trap geology and why the Ghats are full of caves
- The Rashtrakutas, Ellora, and religious life in 8th-century Maharashtra
From this walk
Keep walking
Other routes
Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum
Twenty thousand objects of everyday Indian life, gathered by one man over six decades. We take a themed route through it — so you leave having actually seen something, rather than everything.
Old City Heritage Walk
The walk we come back to again and again. Through Kasba, Shaniwar and Budhwar Peth — past Pune's oldest temple, the walls of Shaniwar Wada, and wada doorways that have been opening onto the same lanes for two hundred years.
In & Around Shaniwar Peth
One of Pune's oldest neighbourhoods, founded under Murtaza Nizam Shah, and one of its least explored. Quiet lanes, magnificent wadas and temples the Peshwas built.