Heritage & Monuments
2 places around Bhubaneswar, with the travel time to each.
Khandagiri & Udayagiri Caves
Dating back to the 1st century BCE, the Khandagiri and Udayagiri Caves were carved during the reign of King Kharavela as retreats for Jain monks. They face each other across the road on twin sandstone hills (eighteen caves cut into Udayagiri, fifteen into Khandagiri) and are cells, low enough that most were meant to be entered on hands and knees and slept in. Rani Gumpha, the largest, runs to two storeys and carries friezes of processions, hunts and dancers around its verandas. Above the entrance to Hathigumpha, the elephant cave, is the inscription the site is known for: seventeen lines of Prakrit in Brahmi script, and the fullest surviving account of Kharavela's reign.
Dhauli Hills
A short drive south of the city, Dhauli rises above the left bank of the Daya, and is held to be where the Kalinga war was fought and where it ended. Eleven of Ashoka's fourteen rock edicts are cut into the stone here in Brahmi, around 260 BCE — the ones in which an emperor who had just won records his remorse at the cost, and turns to Buddhism. Above them a life-size elephant emerges from the living rock, the earliest Buddhist sculpture known in Odisha. On the hill opposite stands the white Shanti Stupa, raised in the early 1970s by the Japan Buddha Sangha with its Kalinga counterpart, its dome carrying five umbrella forms and reliefs of the Buddha's life around the base.