The Kailasha monument at Ellora (near Aurangabad, Maharashtra), viewed as a…

Concept — Rock-cut architecture carves a shrine out of living rock instead of assembling it from quarried blocks. Its most demanding form is the monolithic temple: masons begin at the top of a hillside and cut downward and inward, so tower, halls, pillars and sculpture all emerge from one continuous mass of stone, and nothing can be corrected once it is cut away. Because such a monument carries no foundation deposit and no builder's signature, attributing it to a ruler rests on dated dynastic records - copper-plate grants and inscriptions - that name the reign in which the excavation was ordered.

Applying it here — The Kailasa temple, Cave 16 at Ellora, is exactly this kind of monument: a Dravida-style shrine to Shiva with vimana, mandapa, Nandi pavilion and gateway, cut top-down from the basalt of the Charanandri hills, roughly 60 m long, 30 m wide and 30 m high, with an estimated 200,000 tonnes of rock removed. The Rashtrakuta ruler in whose reign it was excavated is Krishna I (reigned about 756-774 CE), uncle and successor of the dynasty's founder Dantidurga. The attribution rests on the Vadodara (Baroda) copper-plate grant of the Rashtrakuta prince Karka II, dated about 812 CE, which praises a temple raised on the hill at Elapura (Ellora) by 'Krishnaraja' - a wonder, it says, that even its own architect gazed at in astonishment.

Cross-check — the other names belong to different reigns or to different dynasties.

• Krishna II belongs to the same dynasty but reigns more than a century later, about 878-914 CE, when Rashtrakuta effort is absorbed by wars with Vengi and the Gurjara-Pratiharas.

• Vikramaditya is a Badami Chalukya regnal name; Vikramaditya II's queen Lokamahadevi patronised the structural Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal about 740 CE, the built model whose Dravida plan the Ellora monolith echoes on a far larger scale.

• Indravarman belongs to the Eastern Ganga line of Kalinga on the eastern seaboard, a different dynasty and a different region from the Deccan basalt country in which Ellora was cut.

The Kailasha monument at Ellora was therefore erected under the patronage of Krishna I.