In Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is a legacy of British colonial times, formerly called the Victoria Terminus. The station stands at the western end of Indian Central Railway, famous for its combination of Gothic revival architecture with traditional Indian styles. Building on it began in 1878 and took ten years to complete. The Terminus was renamed in 1996 and in 2004 it became the first functional administrative building to make the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The caves at Ellora are a sequence of 34 monasteries and temples dug out of solid basalt rock over around 600 years, with the most recent dating from the 11th century. Images from Hinduism, Buddhism and Jai religious beliefs appear in the carvings, which have attracted pilgrims for more than a thousand years. The caves are 26 km north of the city of Aurangabad.
The Ajanta caves, 99 km from Aurangabad, date from around 100 B.C. The sequence of 30 caves took approximately 600 years to create and their paintings and carvings are a panorama of Indian life at that time. Monks inhabited many of the caves in the past, and much of the decoration has religious symbolism. The caves are in a horseshoe-shaped cliff in a dramatic gorge, and visitors can also see the complex water system which allowed monks to live there.
Elephanta is a complex of caves on an island in the Sea of Oman, 9 kilometers out to sea from Mumbai. The caves are full of 7th century rock art dedicated to the cult of the Hindu Goddess Shiva. The best-known feature here is the huge carving of Shiva in the main cave, which shows the Goddess as creator, protector and destroyer. The caves have been a World Heritage Site since 1987.
