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Updated: June 15, 2025
Here the few palms on the sky-line of the low hills, almost accidental features you might say, are all there is to distinguish the general aspect from some loch side at home. Our Stroke points ashore and grins, and says, "Elephanta," and we say, "Are you sure, is it not an island on Loch Katrine?" and he grins again and bobs and says, "Yes, yes Elephanta!"
It was said that another lady, finding the natives were in the habit of going about without clothes, booked a return passage by the next ship. Here is a jotting at this same landing place of the Prince and Princess going off to the Guard Ship, but I am so sorry it is not reproduced in colour. They were to have gone to the Caves of Elephanta across the bay, but had not time.
An unusually fine market building is surmounted by a handsome clock-tower. There are large, well-equipped hospitals and a college, in addition to the number of buildings for public uses. One frequently sees gayly painted mosques and temples. Among the many ruins, those of Siva, called the Caves of Elephanta, are of most interest.
It crawls out from its holes in the caverns of this island of Elephanta, and, with the miasma just as deadly that rises from the swamps, makes any residence upon its lovely-seeming hillsides a constant menace. But where will not people stay if prompted by self-interest?
How many generations of Hindus, how many races, have knelt in the dust before the Trimurti, your threefold deity, O Elephanta? How many centuries were spent by weak man in digging out in your stone bosom this town of temples and carving your gigantic idols? Who can say?
To ascribe the temples of Elephanta and Kanari to the Buddhists, and to say that their respective periods correspond to the fourth and fifth centuries in the first case, and the tenth in the second, is to introduce into history a very strange and unfounded anachronism. After the first century A.D. there was not left a single influential Buddhist in India.
They are partitioned out, by the labor of the hammer and the chisel, into many separate chambers, and the roof, which in the pagoda of Elephanta is flat, but in that of Salsette is arched, is supported by rows of pillars of great thickness, and arranged with much regularity.
The Island of Elephanta is about one mile and a half to the west of Butcher's Island, and is inhabited by 100 poor Indian families.
Butcher's Island is a small island situated about four miles and a half to the westward of Bombay, and is in circumference about one mile and a half, and has been a very formidable garrison. In the centre is a small fort and two barracks, the latter we took possession of for the ship's company. Soon after our landing on the island, a party of us went over to the Island of Elephanta.
Thanks to the fanaticism of Portuguese soldiers, the chronology of the Indian cave temples must remain for ever an enigma to the archaeological world, beginning with the Brah-mans, who say Elephanta is 374,000 years old, and ending with Fergusson, who tries to prove that it was carved only in the twelfth century of our era.
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