Insight: Ajanta and Ellora

The Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave temples of these two magnificent sites are among the most important monuments in India.

‘The finest gallery of pictures to survive from any ancient civilisation’ is how historian John Keay described the Buddhist cave murals at Ajanta, 105km (65 miles) northeast of Aurangabad. Forgotten for nearly 1,000 years, the jungle site was only rediscovered by a party of British tiger-hunters in 1819. Today it is classified as one of Unesco’s World Heritage monuments. The frescoes and sculptures date from around 200 BC to 650 AD, a period when Buddhism was acquiring some of the sensuousness of Hinduism. People used to the idea of Buddhist thought being essentially a negation of the senses will be startled by the voluptuousness of much of the imagery. Highlights include Cave 1 with its superb murals, and the painted ceiling of Cave 2, although for many people the dramatic setting coupled with the mystique of the caves is reason enough to visit.

Kailasa Temple at Ellora, a representation of Shiva’s mountain, was carved out of 85,000 cubic metres of rock.

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Ellora, 25km (15 miles) northwest of Aurangabad, has 34 rock-cut temples representing the Buddhists (caves 1–12), Brahmanic Hindus (caves 13–29) and Jains (caves 30–34). The term ‘cave temple’ cannot convey the magnitude of the Ellora achievement. These caves were scooped out of the rocks 10 centuries ago, a feat comparable to carving an entire cathedral out of solid rock. The work usually began from the top of the temple and moved downwards to eliminate the need for scaffolding.

The centrepiece at Ellora is the Kailasa Temple. Its architects were not modest in their ambitions; Kailasa is, after all, the mythical mountain where the gods dwell. In its galleries are recreated various scenes from Shiva myths. One of them represents the eternal struggle between the forces of evil represented by Ravana, the demon king of Sri Lanka, and the forces of good represented by Shiva and Parvati.

The Ajanta curse

Early efforts by 19th-century artists to document Ajanta’s art treasures were bedevilled with disasters, leading to speculation that the site was gripped by a malevolent curse. English painter Robert Gill spent 27 years copying the murals, but lost his entire collection in the fire at London’s Crystal Palace in 1866. Exactly the same thing happened to another folio of facsimiles when they were destroyed by fire at the Victoria & Albert Museum. A team of Japanese Buddhist artists also lost their copies, crafted on rice paper, after they were buried in an earthquake.

Subsequent attempts to preserve the world-famous wall paintings met with little more success. Restoration work commissioned by the Nizam of Hyderabad in the 1920s nearly destroyed the murals altogether, when the varnish applied began to crack and flake away, taking fragments of paint with it.