Skip to main content

Posts

Featured

Varaha Roopam at Badami

  Varaha Roopam…..The caller tune of the cabbie’s cell phone kept intruding on my reverie as we sped along the highway to Badami. I was totally oblivious about the origins of the melody and I was shy to ask him. Later that afternoon, the melody broke out in my lips as I stood transfixed in front of the real Varaha Roopam in cave number 3. Vishnu’s third incarnation hasn’t been depicted in a more grandiloquent manner. The boar is holding aloft Bhudevi, the mother goddess of earth, in its left palm and gazing at her face in an expression that is an alloy of love and devotion. It is hard to peel your eyes off the drama carved in sandstone. The sandstone cliff at Badami has four caves at different elevations. Cave number 3 is the oldest and dates back to 6 th C, more precisely 578 CE. This precise dating was possible because of an inscription proclaiming that the cave temple was completed by Mangalesha, during the reign of his stepbrother King Kirtivarma I. It is a Sunday and too many

Latest Posts

W(h)etting my Feet in Pydhonie

A Decade of Travel - 10

A Decade of Travel - 9