EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 23 of 120

Correct — C, (c) The superstructure of the temple corresponds to the Nagara style — and that statement is wrong on one word. The superstructure of the Kailashanatha at Ellora is Dravida, not Nagara. The two styles are told apart by the shape of what rises over the sanctum. A Nagara temple carries a shikhara that is curvilinear, a beehive-like tower whose profile bends inward as it rises, crowned by the ribbed disc called an amalaka and a pot-shaped kalasha; it is the northern form, seen at Khajuraho, at Bhubaneswar and in the Chandela and Odishan temples generally. A Dravida temple carries a vimana instead: a pyramid built of clearly marked receding storeys, each tier ringed with miniature shrines, capped by a small octagonal or domed cupola and a finial; it is the southern form, seen at Kanchipuram, Thanjavur and Pattadakal. The tower over the Ellora sanctum is a storeyed pyramid of exactly the southern kind, which is why the temple is read as a monolithic version of the Dravida temples its patrons knew — the Pallava Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram and the Chalukya Virupaksha at Pattadakal. Everything else in the option set is accurate. The temple is Cave 16 at Ellora in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, carved in the eighth century CE under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, and it is not built but excavated: masons began at the top of a basalt hillside and cut downwards and inwards, removing the rock around a temple that was left standing, so the whole structure — tower, mandapa, Nandi shrine, gateway, courtyard walls, elephants at the base — is one continuous piece of living rock. It is a Shiva temple, and its galleries carry both Shaiva and Vaishnava sculpture. The negation is printed in bold italic in the booklet, so the item is asking for the single false statement, and only the style label is false.

• (a)The temple was carved out of rocks in the Eighth Century CE. — True as printed, so it cannot be the answer. The temple is dated to the eighth century CE and attributed to the Rashtrakuta ruler Krishna I, whose reign falls in the third quarter of that century, and the phrase 'carved out of rocks' is exact rather than loose: this is a monolithic rock-cut temple, quarried downward from the top of the scarp so that the finished building was released from the hill rather than assembled on it. Rejecting the option because a temple 'must' be built stone upon stone is the misreading it invites; at Ellora the sequence runs the other way, from solid hillside to hollowed temple.
• (b)The temple is dedicated to Lord Shiva. — True, and the least contestable statement in the set. The Kailashanatha is a Shaiva foundation — its very name declares it, Kailasa being Shiva's mountain — and the temple is conceived as that mountain rendered in stone, with the linga sanctum, the Nandi pavilion facing it across the court, and the celebrated panel of Ravana shaking Kailasa carved into the plinth. The one distraction worth noting is that the same name belongs to another famous temple, the Pallava Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram; both are Shiva temples, so the confusion does not affect this option, but it does matter when a question asks about dynasty or place.
• (d)The temple has both Shaiva and Vaishnava sculptures. — True. Although the temple is dedicated to Shiva, its galleries and side panels carry Vaishnava sculpture as well — Vishnu's incarnations appear in the reliefs, including Narasimha and Varaha and Krishna raising Govardhana, alongside the Shaiva panels of Ravana beneath Kailasa, the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, and the river goddesses at the entrance. That mixture is normal rather than anomalous in eighth-century Deccan practice, where a royal foundation displayed the whole Puranic pantheon regardless of the deity in the sanctum, and a candidate who assumes sectarian exclusivity will wrongly mark this statement as the false one.

Indian temple architecture is examined chiefly through the Nagara-Dravida distinction, and the distinction is one of superstructure. Nagara, the northern style, sets a square sanctum with projecting offsets under a curvilinear shikhara that carries an amalaka and a kalasha at its summit, generally without an enclosing wall or gateway towers. Dravida, the southern style, sets the sanctum under a vimana built as a pyramid of receding storeys, topped by a small octagonal or domed cupola, and encloses the whole in a walled compound entered through gopuras, which grow taller than the vimana itself in later centuries. A third label, Vesara, is applied to Deccan temples that mix features of the two. The Kailashanatha at Ellora belongs to the Dravida family: it reproduces, in a single excavated mass of basalt, the plan and the storeyed tower of a southern structural temple. Ellora itself is a site of thirty-four excavations cut into a basalt scarp in Maharashtra — Buddhist, Hindu and Jaina caves in adjoining stretches of the same cliff — and it is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Cave 16 is the largest and the most ambitious of them, and it is usually taught alongside the Pallava Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram and the Chalukya Virupaksha at Pattadakal, the structural temples whose form it borrows.

Art and architecture questions on this paper are answered by holding two or three diagnostic features per style rather than by remembering how a monument looks. That is what makes the item tractable: three of the four statements here concern date, deity and iconography, which most candidates can settle, and the fourth turns entirely on whether the tower over the sanctum is curvilinear or storeyed. The examiner has chosen the one attribute that a purely visual memory will not settle, because a candidate who has only seen a photograph remembers a huge courtyard and elephants, not the profile of the shikhara. The negative ask adds the second layer of difficulty, and this booklet prints the 'not' in bold italic precisely because the item collapses without it. The working method is to mark each statement true or false in the margin and then pick the single false one; do not stop at the first statement that feels unfamiliar, because unfamiliarity and falsity are different things and the paper deducts one-third of 2.5 marks for confusing them.

• The Kailashanatha temple is Cave 16 at Ellora in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, carved in the eighth century CE under the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, and it is dedicated to Shiva.
• It is a monolithic rock-cut temple: masons cut downward and inward from the top of a basalt scarp, so tower, mandapa, Nandi shrine, gateway and courtyard walls are all one continuous piece of living rock rather than assembled masonry.
• Its superstructure is Dravida — a pyramidal vimana of receding storeys capped by an octagonal cupola — and the temple is generally read as a rock-cut version of southern structural temples such as the Pallava Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram and the Chalukya Virupaksha at Pattadakal.
• Nagara and Dravida are distinguished by the superstructure: Nagara carries a curvilinear shikhara topped by an amalaka and kalasha, while Dravida carries a storeyed pyramidal vimana within a walled enclosure entered through gopuras; Vesara is the label used for Deccan temples that combine features of both.
• Although a Shiva temple, the Kailashanatha carries Vaishnava sculpture alongside Shaiva — Vishnu's incarnations in the galleries as well as the Ravana-shaking-Kailasa panel at the plinth — and Ellora as a whole, with its Buddhist, Hindu and Jaina caves in one scarp, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

• Answering a style question from a remembered photograph; the Nagara-Dravida decision is made by the profile of the tower over the sanctum, not by the size of the courtyard or the presence of elephants
• Assuming a Shiva temple can carry only Shaiva imagery — eighth-century royal foundations regularly display the whole Puranic pantheon, and Vaishnava panels at the Kailashanatha are the norm, not an anomaly
• Confusing the Kailashanatha at Ellora, a Rashtrakuta monolith in Maharashtra, with the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram, a Pallava structural temple in Tamil Nadu; the shared name is regularly used to build a wrong pair
• Missing the bold italic 'not' in the stem and marking the first statement that reads as true, which on a negative item converts a question you know into a wrong answer plus a one-third-mark deduction

Art and archaeology appear in the opening block of Part B on this paper and again in the sixties, and they are asked either as this kind of four-statement negative item about a single named monument or as a pair-matching item on architectural terms. The recurring monuments are the famous ones — Ellora, Ajanta, Elephanta, Mahabalipuram, Khajuraho, Konark, Thanjavur — and the recurring attributes are dynasty, century, deity, style and technique. Learn each monument as a five-slot record covering exactly those attributes, because the false statement in a question of this type is almost always produced by flipping one slot, and the style slot is the one flipped most often.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Kailashanatha temple at Ellora is attributed to the patronage of a ruler of which one of the following dynasties?

  • (a)Pallava
  • (b)Rashtrakuta
  • (c)Chalukya of Badami
  • (d)Chandela

  Answer(b) Rashtrakuta — the monolithic Kailashanatha, Cave 16 at Ellora, was excavated in the eighth century CE under Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty, which ruled the Deccan from Manyakheta. The Pallavas built the Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram and the shore temple at Mahabalipuram, the Badami Chalukyas the Virupaksha at Pattadakal, and the Chandelas the Nagara temples at Khajuraho.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following features is characteristic of the Nagara style rather than of the Dravida style of temple architecture?

  • (a)A curvilinear shikhara crowned by an amalaka and a kalasha
  • (b)A pyramidal vimana built of receding storeys
  • (c)A walled enclosure entered through towering gopuras
  • (d)A separate pavilion housing the seated Nandi facing the sanctum

  Answer(a) A curvilinear shikhara crowned by an amalaka and a kalasha — this bending, beehive-like tower with its ribbed disc and pot finial is the diagnostic feature of the northern or Nagara style. The storeyed pyramidal vimana, the enclosure wall with gopuras, and the detached Nandi pavilion all belong to the southern or Dravida tradition, which is the tradition the rock-cut Kailashanatha at Ellora reproduces.