Barabar Caves

The granite hills of Barabar rise out of the plain north of Gaya like whalebacks, and in the 260s BCE Ashoka's masons cut four chambers into them for the Ajivikas — an ascetic sect, rivals of the Buddhists and Jains, who went naked and believed in absolute fate. His grandson Dasharatha cut three more at Nagarjuni next door. They are the first rock-cut caves in India, and the ancestors of Ajanta and Ellora.

The Ajivikas vanished within a few centuries. The caves stayed open and a 5th-century king defaced some inscriptions; a Shiva temple grew up on the hilltop; and in 1924 E. M. Forster made them, as the Marabar Caves, the dark heart of A Passage to India — the place where the echo swallowed every meaning.

The Lomas Rishi cave is the one everybody comes for: a doorway carved to imitate a wooden hut, with a frieze of elephants bowing to a stupa, the earliest ogee arch in India and the model for every chaitya window after it. Inside, the chambers are plain and polished to a mirror finish — the 'Mauryan polish' that no one has quite explained — and clap once and the echo comes back twenty times, exactly as Forster wrote.

A steep flight of steps climbs to the Siddheshwar Nath temple on the summit for a view over the whole Magadh plain to Gaya. Nagarjuni's caves are a kilometre's walk through a quiet valley. The site has a new approach road and ticket counter but remains lightly visited; a local guide with a torch is useful for the inscriptions.