Indian History

Built from Top to Bottom: India’s Underground Wonder Ellora’s Cave Temples

Ellora – the cave city that redefined human imagination. Imagine this: you stand before a temple so grand, so intricately carved, that you’d assume it took centuries to build brick by brick. But here’s the twist—this temple wasn’t built at all. It was carved, top to bottom, out of a single massive rock. Welcome to the Ellora Cave Temples, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Maharashtra, where history, art, and devotion fuse into a timeless wonder. The Top-to-Bottom Secret: Why Ellora Stuns the World Unlike most monuments that rise from the ground upward, Ellora’s most famous shrine, the Kailasa Temple, was chiseled straight down into the basalt rock of the Charanandri Hills. Imagine the engineering genius and patience it took—workers began at the top and meticulously chipped away layer by layer, revealing not just walls, but entire courtyards, sculptures, shrines, and corridors. Historians believe it took thousands of laborers and ...

Soham Halder
  • 1 month ago
  • 4 minutes read
Built from Top to Bottom: India’s Underground Wonder Ellora’s Cave Temples
Built from Top to Bottom: India’s Underground Wonder Ellora’s Cave Temples
Ellora – the cave city that redefined human imagination. Imagine this: you stand before a temple so grand, so intricately carved, that you’d assume...
Sailen Manna: Barefoot Footballer Who Took Indian Football to the World
Sailen Manna: Barefoot Footballer Who Took Indian Football to the World
How a boy from Howrah rose to lead India’s golden generation of football, proving that courage and culture mattered more than boots on foreign soil...
The Mother Who Dreamed of Swaraj: Understanding Jijabai’s Role in Shaping Shivaji
The Mother Who Dreamed of Swaraj: Understanding Jijabai’s Role in Shaping Shivaji
Behind the rise of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, there was his mother, Jijabai Shahaji Bhonsale.  We remember the one who made history, but not...
Dhyan Chand’s 1936 Berlin Hat-Trick: When Even Hitler Took Notice
Dhyan Chand’s 1936 Berlin Hat-Trick: When Even Hitler Took Notice
In Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, Dhyan Chand’s hat-trick not only sealed India’s third straight gold but also turned a hockey match into a quiet act of defi...
Founding of Hindu College in 1817: The Dawn of Modern Higher Education
Founding of Hindu College in 1817: The Dawn of Modern Higher Education
How a small Calcutta college in 1817 sparked India’s first modern intellectual awakening In the early nineteenth century, Calcutta was a city in tr...
From Grandeur to Silence: Why Akbar Abandoned His Dream City
From Grandeur to Silence: Why Akbar Abandoned His Dream City
From royal buzz to empty halls – the untold tale of Fatehpur Sikri! Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a city carved out of red sandstone, gl...
Globalisation Before Its Time: Understanding Pune’s Ancient Trade with Rome
Globalisation Before Its Time: Understanding Pune’s Ancient Trade with Rome
Let's revisit the time when Indo-Roman trade turned Pune into a hub of global exchange. Long before anyone even spoke of globalization, India was a...
Heroes Off Screen Too: THESE Hindi Film Actors Took Part in India's Independence Movement
Heroes Off Screen Too: THESE Hindi Film Actors Took Part in India's Independence Movement
Patriotism was their reality, not just a role on screen.  Bollywood has often recreated the struggles of India’s freedom movement on screen, w...
How Ice Blocks Travelled Thousands of Miles to Cool British India: Know the Astonishing Story
How Ice Blocks Travelled Thousands of Miles to Cool British India: Know the Astonishing Story
In an age without refrigerators, the British in India still found a way to sip chilled drinks under the scorching sun. Refrigerators only became co...
Macaulay’s Minute of 1835: The Blueprint of Modern Indian Education
Macaulay’s Minute of 1835: The Blueprint of Modern Indian Education
A single policy choice in colonial India created an English-educated elite, opened doors to global knowledge, but also sidelined indigenous wisdom tha...
Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala: The Royal Patron Who Backed Indian Sport
Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala: The Royal Patron Who Backed Indian Sport
From funding Olympians to founding cricket tournaments, Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala shaped India’s early sporting story In an era when Indi...
Qutb Minar’s Iron Pillar: The Rust-Proof Mystery That Defies Science
Qutb Minar’s Iron Pillar: The Rust-Proof Mystery That Defies Science
The 1,600-year-old marvel that still shines without a speck of rust. If you’ve ever visited Qutb Minar in Delhi, chances are you’ve stood in awe be...
The Aligarh Movement: Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Vision for Muslim Education
The Aligarh Movement: Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Vision for Muslim Education
How Sir Syed Ahmed Khan reshaped Muslim identity through science and modern learning In the nineteenth century, Indian Muslims found themselves at...
The Bombay Quadrangular: When Cricket Became a Battleground for Identity and Nationalism
The Bombay Quadrangular: When Cricket Became a Battleground for Identity and Nationalism
How a colonial pastime, once divided by community lines, transformed into a stage for resistance, social change, and the birth of a national identity...
The Silent Army of Spies in Mughal Courts: The Secret Network That Decided Wars
The Silent Army of Spies in Mughal Courts: The Secret Network That Decided Wars
Not swords, not cannons, but secrets shaped the destiny of empires. When we think of the Mughal Empire, images of glittering palaces, mighty empero...
Three Consecutive Olympic Hockey Golds (1928–1936): India’s Pre-Independence Glory
Three Consecutive Olympic Hockey Golds (1928–1936): India’s Pre-Independence Glory
How India’s hockey team conquered the Olympic stage three times in a row, long before the nation itself was free India was still under British rule...
When Architecture Became Poetry: Konark Sun Temple; the Chariot of the Sun God
When Architecture Became Poetry: Konark Sun Temple; the Chariot of the Sun God
When architecture turned into poetry carved in stone! If you’ve ever stood in front of the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha, you know it isn’t just a mo...
India On Wheels: Iconic Mountain Train Routes One Must Checkout
India On Wheels: Iconic Mountain Train Routes One Must Checkout
Toy trains are a timeless delight that take you through scenic mountain ways at a pace that makes you feel like the world has stopped As we are tho...
Debunking the Taj Mahal Myth: Did Shah Jahan Really Cut Off His Workers’ Hands?
Debunking the Taj Mahal Myth: Did Shah Jahan Really Cut Off His Workers’ Hands?
Did the hands that built the Taj really pay the ultimate price, or is it just a story etched in folklore? When a story survives for centuries, we t...
Lala Amarnath: First Indian to Score a Test Century in 1933
Lala Amarnath: First Indian to Score a Test Century in 1933
Amarnath’s 118 did not win India the match, but it gave the country its first taste of cricketing self-belief on the world stage On a December afte...
The Battle of Plassey: How a Mango Grove Changed the Fate of India
The Battle of Plassey: How a Mango Grove Changed the Fate of India
How shade, strategy, and mango trees gave the British an empire. When you think of mangoes, you probably think of juicy Alphonsos in summer, or you...
When Gandhi Stood Up for Bihar’s Farmers: The Untold Story of Champaran
When Gandhi Stood Up for Bihar’s Farmers: The Untold Story of Champaran
How Gandhi’s first satyagraha in India changed the lives of Champaran farmers April 17, 1917. The dusty fields of Champaran in Bihar buzzed with an...
Palwankar Baloo: The Dalit Cricketer Who Bowled Over Caste Barriers
Palwankar Baloo: The Dalit Cricketer Who Bowled Over Caste Barriers
Denied entry to pavilions but never to history, Baloo’s journey from a Dalit ground boy to India’s first cricketing hero remains a symbol of resistanc...
The Controversial Rowlatt Act: How Oppression United a Nation
The Controversial Rowlatt Act: How Oppression United a Nation
How the Rowlatt Act united India in fury and sparked the Gandhian era March 18, 1919. Delhi’s corridors of power buzzed with hurried debates, but o...
India On Wheels: Five Indian Trains That Offer Luxury Like No Other
India On Wheels: Five Indian Trains That Offer Luxury Like No Other
India has no dearth of luxury trains with suites starting from INR one lakh Indian Railways is one of the biggest railway organisations in the worl...
The Mentor Who Made an Emperor: How Chanakya Helped Chandragupta Build the Maurya Empire
The Mentor Who Made an Emperor: How Chanakya Helped Chandragupta Build the Maurya Empire
This is the story of a scholar and his student who, together, changed the course of Indian history. The word kingmaker is often heard these days, u...
The Phantom Warrior Who Tormented the British Raj
The Phantom Warrior Who Tormented the British Raj
The relentless rebel whose guerrilla genius kept the Empire on edge Imagine being a British officer in 1858, stationed deep in the Indian plains. O...
What Was South India’s Story, While the Indus Valley Thrived Up North?
What Was South India’s Story, While the Indus Valley Thrived Up North?
A journey into South India’s life and legacy during the Indus Valley era. The Indus Valley Civilization flourished across present-day northwest Ind...
Rangin Mahal: Bidar’s Palace of Rainbow Walls
Rangin Mahal: Bidar’s Palace of Rainbow Walls
Step inside Rangin Mahal, where walls whisper stories in rainbow shades. When you think of Karnataka, what comes to mind? Bengaluru’s IT buzz, Hamp...
The 1911 Indian Cricket Tour of England: India’s First International Foray in the Sport
The 1911 Indian Cricket Tour of England: India’s First International Foray in the Sport
Decades before Test cricket, a band of princes, clerks, and spinners carried India’s colors across England, stitching together the country’s first cri...