The earliest European references to Elephanta date from the sixteenth century, although several earlier travelers are known to have been in the immediate area. Marco Polo visited the nearby town of Thana around 1292-1293, upon returning from his famous stay in China. in his account, Polo remarked that "Tana is a great kingdom lying towards the west, a kingdom great both in size and worth. The people are Idolaters, with a language of their own, and a king of their own, and tributary to nobody." The use of the term "Idolaters" would seem to indicate that the region was predominantly Hindu.
Shortly after Polo's visit, in 1322, a Franciscan friar named Odoric from Pordenone in northern Italy visited western India before going to China. He too stopped in Thana, where he noted the recent martyrdom in 1321 of four Friars Minor, whose executions had been ordered by a Moslem governor. Odoric also notes that Thana was a great place in days of old, for it was the city of King Porus, who waged so great a battle with King Alexander. The people thereof are idolaters, for they worship fire, and serpents, and trees also. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by force of arms, and they are now subject to the Empire of DILI [Delhi].
The earliest recorded European visit to Elephanta itself was apparently made in 1534 by Garcia da Orta, a Portuguese physician and scientist, in the company of the Portuguese sea captain Martim Afonso de Sousa. Orta included his record in his remarkable book, Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas da India (Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India), published at Goa in 1563. After describing cave-temples on the island of Salsette, he surveys Elephanta briefly as follows:
Another pagoda, the best of all, is on an island called Pori, which we call the Isle of the Elephant. On it there is a hill and in the upper part of it is a subterranean house worked out of the living rock, and the house is as large as a monastery. Within there are courts and cisterns of good water. On the walls, all round, there are sculptured images of elephants, lions, tigers, and many human images, some like Amazons, and in many other shapes well sculptured. Certainly it is a sight well worth seeing, and it would appear that the devil had used all his powers and knowledge to deceive the gentiles into his worship. Some say that it is the work of the Chinese when they navigated to this land. It might well be true seeing that it is so well worked and that the Chinese are sutis. It is true that, at the present day, this pagoda is much defiled by cattle getting inside but in the year 1534, when I came from Portugal, it was a very fine sight. I saw it at the time when Bataim was at war with us. Soon afterwards the King of Cambaya ceded it to [Governor] Nuño da Cunha.
A more detailed description of the Elephanta cave is found in the logbook of Dom João de Castro, who later became the fourth Portuguese viceroy and a governor of India. He visited the island between December 12 and 18, 1538. His enthusiastic chronicle, Roteiro de Goa a Diu (Journey from Goa to Diu), written when the armada was enroute from Goa to the fortress at Diu, is regarded as "the first, careful scientific description of these shores." He first notes the topography of the island, then its myriad of birds and wild groves, and the lifelike statue of an elephant from which the island takes its name. He then observes the remarkable quality and variety of carvings in the temple, that seemed impossible to be made by human hands. Castro made measurements of the temple and remarked on the "two huge, ferocious guardians" flanking each door of the shrine; that within this chapel was an altar "with a large ball (obviously the linga*) that must symbolize the world''; in one of the other chapels that encircle the interior, a man is shown from the waist up with three faces and four armsin one right hand a hooded cobra is held, in the left the shape of a rose, in another the world is raised ("o mundo alevantado"), and the remaining hand is broken; in another chapel is a giant-like man with eight armstwo of them are raised to support the sky of the chapel ("o ceo da capela"), another holds a sword aloft, the fourth holds a bell shaped object, the fifth holds a boy by one foot with the head down, the sixth has a vase-like shield ("vaso como escudela") and has a covering of ashes ("nele emborilhado"), a chain of skulls of little boys, and a cobra, and the other two arms are broken; another chapel has a large bodied woman like a giantess, entirely naked, with a breast only on the right side, "thus like it is written of the Amazons"; and he briefly notices the cistern and the east wing. He seems to have been overwhelmed by the incomparable novelty and history of the cave, an understanding of which was beyond him. He does not posit any identifications of the reliefs, nor does he mention the existence of any inscription or plaque.
The next Portuguese account of Elephanta is by Diogo de Couto, an official chronicler at the time. It was written in 1603 but with reference to a visit he made to the monument some fifty years earlier, that is, perhaps only ten years or so after Castro's trip to the island. His account is more detailed than the latter's, and he mentions that an inscribed stone was removed from the entrance and sent to the king of Portugal. He observed a bright lime and bitumen coating over the whole temple interior.
~~The Iconography and Ritual of Siva At Elephanta -by- Charles Dillard Collins
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