The oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India, cut under the Mauryas between 322 and 185 BC, 24 km north of Gaya. What stops people is the finish. The granite interiors were polished to a mirror, a technique called Mauryan polish that nobody has fully explained and nobody since has matched, and the chambers ring: clap once in Sudama and the sound will not stop for several seconds. Ashoka dedicated several of them by inscription, Sudama in 257 BC in the twelfth year of his reign and Karan Chaupar around his nineteenth, and they were given not to Buddhists but to ascetics of the Ajivika sect, a third movement of the same period that has almost entirely disappeared. E. M. Forster put them, renamed Marabar, at the centre of A Passage to India, and the thing that happens in that book happens because of the echo. Jehanabad district, Bihar.
Jehanabad district, Bihar, India
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