Maharashtra holds the oldest surviving religious architecture in India, and it is architecture cut downward and inward rather than built up.
The Buddhist cave complexes of the Western Ghats, at Ajanta, Karla, Bhaja and elsewhere, were excavated from the second century BCE onward as monsoon retreats and monastic residences on trade routes between the coast and the plateau. Ajanta's later caves carry wall paintings of the fifth century that are the principal surviving evidence for Indian painting of the period and for the narrative literature of the Buddha's previous lives. At Ellora, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain excavations stand along the same escarpment, and the Kailasa temple there is a complete Shaiva temple with towers, courtyards and free-standing elephants carved downward out of the living rock as a single piece.
The modern event of comparable weight took place at Nagpur in October 1956, when B. R. Ambedkar, the principal drafter of the Indian constitution and a leader of the Dalit movement, publicly converted to Buddhism with several hundred thousand followers. He had announced two decades earlier that he would not die a Hindu, and the conversion was argued as an escape from a religion he held to be inseparable from caste. The form he taught, set out in The Buddha and His Dhamma, is social and rational in emphasis, and the movement remains concentrated in the state.