In her new book, Cave of My Ancestors, Kirin Narayan offers a reflective exploration of family stories that reveal the rich history of a seventh-century Buddhist shrine. In this excerpt, we share a snippet from the book’s introduction.

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Joining Palms at Ellora

My father always loved a far-fetched story. He was never beyond some clever plaster and vivid paint to make his version of events more astounding. As I learned to read, he showed me how playing with words could remake the world: spell backward, pun between languages, slide sideways through metaphor. In conversations and in correspondence, he thrived on provoking laughter. Yet throughout my childhood, when Pa mentioned Ellora, he set aside this habitual irreverence.

When I recall Pa speaking of our family’s connection to the ancient, rock-cut cave temples at Ellora, I sense sea breezes blowing across the porch of our home in what was then Bombay. I can’t picture Pa’s face or hear his exact words. What I do remember is the essence of the story and his marveling tone. Our ancestors, Pa said, had made the Ellora caves. At that time, many centuries ago, they still worked with stone. They hadn’t yet turned to wood, hadn’t yet become Suthar carpenters.

At Ellora, he continued, was a temple to Vishwakarma. “The Architect of the Universe” was how Pa, a University of Colorado–trained civil engineer, described Vishwakarma. As hereditary Suthars, we were Sons of Vishwakarma. No matter where in India our Suthar ancestors later migrated to find work, they came back on pilgrimage to Ellora.

Near this Vishwakarma temple was a sacred pond, the Vishwa Kund. Pa said that when our artisan ancestors bathed in this pond, they gained the right to wear the upper castes’ sacred thread.

I hadn’t been to Ellora and had no expectation that Pa—rarely an attentive parent—would take me there in any way other than words. Imagining Ellora, I thought not of temples and caves I’d actually visited but of stone monuments at the periphery of my world: pale marble pillars in Greek ruins on picture postcards that our American grandmother Nani sent, along with precious foreign stamps; huge, seated sandstone figures, soon to be submerged by the Aswan Dam, from a slideshow our usually aloof British neighbor Stella Snead had invited us children to view; overgrown, disintegrating temples in jungles from photographs in Stella’s signed book. I remembered the cliffs of Petra, whose building facades I had carefully colored pink for a social studies assignment at the Bombay International School, and the labyrinthine South American temple where Tintin and Snowy were trapped in one of the comic books passed among my classmates. . . .

I wondered whether other small girls were told of their ancestors’ role in making places of ancient grandeur. A long cord of Suthar ancestors seemed to twist backward like an unwinding turban, pleat forward like a wrapping sari, tilting and curving into an enormous question mark with Ellora circled at the base.

I might never have looked more closely into this family story if my husband Ken and I hadn’t begun research on how religion and technology combine in the figure of Vishwakarma. As the deity who makes marvelous objects and miraculous places in both Hindu and Buddhist mythologies, Vishwakarma has long been claimed as the ancestor of hereditary artisans in India. With industrialization, workers handling tools and machines also turned to Vishwakarma as an icon of ingenuity and for their protection in the workplace.

When Ken and I began traveling around India in September 2017, we found that for some upper caste and upper-class people, Vishwakarma was unknown or dimly remembered as a maker for other gods. “But how did you even think of such a project?” they would ask. Mention of Vishwakarma could evoke anecdotes about how some worker—a carpenter constructing architectural models, a computer repair specialist, a man summoned to fix a club’s swimming pool pump—had inconveniently refused to handle tools on a day of Vishwakarma worship.

In contrast, our interest was immediately understood in artisans’ homes and community temples, and when we joined celebrations amid bedecked machines in workshops or factories. Learning of our research, a hereditary carpenter who owned a flour-processing mill declared, “All gods have their moment. Vishwakarma’s moment has now come because he is the ‘technical devatā’—the technology god.” As we moved across India, we learned how Vishwakarma has been historically honored in different regions’ iconographies, calendars, ritual practices, and stories. It was only to the west that we kept hearing about Vishwakarma’s association with “Iloṛgaṛh”—that is, Ellora. What I’d grown up thinking of as my own family story turned out to be shared with other families allied with Vishwakarma in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Today, the rock-hewn caves at Ellora, in the Sahyadri mountain range in the state of Maharashtra, are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, as are the nearby Ajanta caves. Both Ajanta and Ellora draw scores of tourists from all around India and across the world; when I mention

working on this book, I often meet a delighted response that conjures the pair as conjoined twins: “I love Ajanta-Ellora!”The two sites are similar but different. At Ajanta, the thirty exquisitely sculptured and delicately painted Buddhist caves extending along the mountain cliffs of a ravine

were made between the second century BCE and fifth century CE. At Ellora, thirty-four Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves were excavated into the scarp of a mountain between about the sixth and tenth centuries CE. Numbered from the south, the Ellora temples, shrines, and dwellings stretch across a mile and a quarter, transected by two waterways that can become spectacular monsoon waterfalls.

In January 2018, Ken and I flew into Aurangabad, the city nearest the caves. Our driver, who had escorted many scholars, cordially asked what brought us to Ellora. He looked over his shoulder, startled, when we said,“Vishwakarma.”

“In thirty-four years of driving a taxi in Aurangabad, you are the first

to mention Vishwakarma!” he said.

“Cave 10 is also called the Vishwakarma Cave,” I responded.

“Yes, yes,” said our driver. “Yes, that used to be the name of the cave . . .

Vishwakarma.” He studied me in his rearview mirror. “But how did you

think of this topic?”

Ken was silent, making space for me to reply. I could have said something about my family, but hesitated. How absurd would it seem for a woman with not-quite Indian looks to step off a plane and announce a local connection spanning fourteen, maybe fifteen, centuries?

Yes, I was born in Bombay to an Indian father. But my mother was American, and ever since scholarships took me to college in New York, I had mostly been based in the United States. And being with Ken—of German and Welsh descent, raised in New Jersey—further emphasized

my foreignness. Ken and I had worked as cultural anthropologists in American universities for years, but to complicate identities even more, in 2013 we took up jobs in Australia. This meant that for many people we met through research, we were primarily Australian. Just before our Ellora trip, I had watched the MC at a Vishwakarma-related celebration in Ahmedabad tapping my name into his mobile phone: to my first name, spelled more conventionally with an a, he appended the respectful sisterly title ben, then added a new place-based surname. I had become “Kiranben Ostrelia.”

Sensing that our work as scholars might be dismissed as my diasporic identity quest, I tended to respond to queries about how and why we chose this topic by summoning larger, more inclusive stakes.

“All these heritage sites were made by actual people,” I said. “We don’t know much about them or the feelings they had about the places they made. But here at Ellora, artisans have kept coming back to offer worship to Vishwakarma.”

Our driver nodded, mulling this over, and our conversation turned to other topics. Leaving Aurangabad, we headed into open fields, with the lava formations of the Deccan plateau like faraway ships on the horizon. We drove onward past the conical hill of the Daulatabad fort, a tall tower rising at its side, onward through dusty villages and occasional stone ruins. The Ellora mountain came into view, its gently curving slopes yellowed by dry grass and speckled with low green shrubs and scattered trees. A thick gray band of basalt cliff ran along the mountain base. Coming closer, we bent toward the car windows on our right to glimpse the doorways of caves receding into darkness.

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Kirin Narayan is emerita professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She is the author of several books, including My Family and Other Saints, Everyday Creativity, and Alive in the Writing, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora is available now on our website or wherever good books are sold.