Girijatmaj, Lenyadri

Girijatmaj is the sixth shrine of the Ashtavinayak yatra and its only hill temple. The climb of some 283 stone steps is itself part of the pilgrimage, opening at the top onto the cave-sanctum and a wide view across the Kukadi valley.

The image is carved directly onto the cave's rear wall and counted swayambhu, self-arisen; it is the least distinctly formed of the eight, roughly hewn and thickly coated in sindoor, its trunk turning to the left. Unusually, the shrine's entrance faces south while the deity faces north, so devotees offer worship from behind the Lord — and, stripped of its ceremonial brass mask, the rock image is said to show but a single eye, a detail pilgrims recount with wonder.

Worshipped as the child of Parvati, Ganesha at Lenyadri carries a gentleness that draws families in particular. The shrine's great days are the Magh festival around Ganesh Jayanti and Bhadrapada's Ganesh Chaturthi, when the hillside fills with pilgrims and, by local custom, bullock-cart races are run in the fields below.

Girijatmaj is the most unusual of the Ashtavinayak shrines, for it is not a built temple at all but a chamber cut into living rock. It occupies one of the Lenyadri caves — a group of some thirty Buddhist excavations of the Hinayana period, roughly the 1st to 3rd centuries CE — ranged along a hill on the north bank of the Kukadi river near Junnar, about ninety kilometres north of Pune. Two of the caves are chaitya prayer-halls and the rest viharas, or monks' residences; the group is sometimes called Ganesh Lena for the shrine at its heart, which sits in the largest excavation, long known as Cave 7.

The name means 'son of Girija', Girija being a name of Parvati; by tradition the goddess performed years of penance on this hill to obtain Ganesha as her child, and here he passed his infancy, so the Lord is worshipped in his child form. In a later age two of the vihara's rear cells were merged and the opening widened to frame the rock image, and Maratha-period murals were painted on the walls.

That layered heritage — a Buddhist monastery become a Hindu shrine, its sanctity gathered over nearly two thousand years — sets Lenyadri apart from every other stop on the circuit; the complex, with its neighbouring halls and cells, is today protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, as much a monument of India's rock-cut architecture as a living place of worship.

The sanctum occupies a vihara of striking scale: a hall about seventeen metres deep and fifteen across, entirely unpillared — the rock ceiling spanning the whole space without a single central support — with low stone benches along three sides and some twenty former monks' cells opening off it. A pillared veranda fronts the hall, its columns crowned with animal capitals of lion, elephant and bull in the old Buddhist manner, and a rock-cut cistern still holds water in the courtyard.

There is no shikhara and no masonry tower; the architecture here is one of subtraction, everything carved away from the hill rather than built up upon it. Light from the mouth of the cave reaches deep into the hall, so that the sanctum is lit without lamps for part of the day. The ascent, up eight flights of stone steps, is railed and dotted with rest-points, and doli-bearers carry those who cannot make the climb.