Ajanta, which was created in the second century B.C., had disappeared from popular consciousness around the eighth century A.D., when Buddhism faded away in India, largely absorbed by a reformed and resurgent Hinduism. Eleven hundred years of neglect have preserved it well, particularly its paintings, though we wondered about the long-term effects of the helpful ministrations of the lighting attendant. We were grateful that he existed, though, because there would have been no other way to have captured, from three angles, the extraordinarily enigmatic expression of the Padmapani Bodhisattava in Cave 1, an amazing work that invites comparisons to Da Vinci's Gioconda. The young male figure, his elongated eyes both brooding and reverential, a lotus in his hand, his expression soulful in the fullest sense of that overused word, seems both of this world and beyond it. The cave carvings and paintings are positioned so as to catch natural light at certain moments of the day, and if one had all day one could have waited to see how different rays of sunlight might have illuminated different aspects of the face and figure portrayed in this magnificent painting. But even five minutes under electric light told us we were in the presence of a work of genius.
Buddhist monks lived and learned in the womb-shaped caves, which served as their monasteries and seats of learning. The paintings of tales from the Buddhist Jatakas and the nondevotional images of princesses and nymphs suggest the caves were also intended to attract lay visitors. Our guide had an attentive eye for signs of modern life in ancient art, pointing out figures carrying such items of daily use as Coke-shaped bottles, glass tumblers, and playing cards. (“Ancient India had Coke,” he smiled proudly.) With the football World Cup going on, he showed Ishaan and Kanishk a figure in a blue striped garment that might have been a soccer jersey. But when he suggested that a hanger-on in one Buddhist painting was actually wearing blue jeans, I called a halt to his appropriations of the past. The truth was remarkable enough: many of the paintings testified to an amazing degree of international contact and trade. The ceiling in Cave 2 is covered with portraits of visiting princes, including a Persian monarch and his consort; Hellenic influences are reflected in bacchanalian figures wearing stockings and hats; all this two thousand years before “international relations” became a subject of study rather than what you acquired if you married abroad.
The desire to astonish sometimes takes tourists too far. In Cave 6, our guide asked an attendant to thump a series of pillars with the heel of his palm to produce musical sounds; amusing, but it seems highly unlikely that the monks ever used the rock pillars for an orchestra. No, it's the paintings that made Ajanta special for us. The art of Ajanta has a standing comparable in the history of Asian art to the place that the frescoes of Siena and Florence enjoy in the development of European art. The Ajanta painters used a tempera technique, applying their colors onto a thin layer of dry plaster rather than directly on the walls themselves. The plaster was composed of organic material, including vegetable fibers and rice husks, mixed with fine sand. The paints themselves, in vivid chromatic colors, were derived from locally available minerals, though the blue is believed to have come from lapis lazuli imported from Central Asia. Legend has it that several attempts to reconstitute the paints after chemical analysis failed — the ancients knew a thing or two that the moderns cannot replicate.
Apart from the Padmapani figure in Cave 1, I was most struck by a painting in Cave 16. It portrays the emotional scene of the conversion of Prince Nanda by the Buddha, as his princess swoons, realizing she is to lose her husband to the world-renouncing faith of his preceptor. The narrative painting, depicting the mournful messenger bearing the news, an attendant bringing the prince's rejected crown, and melancholy ladies-in-waiting consoling the grieving princess, is an extraordinary evocation of the price of faith, rendered with exquisite sensitivity. In a different mood is a flying apsara (celestial nymph) in Cave 17, a figure of joy and glitter, her necklace studded with diamonds and sapphires that glint fifteen centuries after she was painted, her ribbons trailing gaily as she swings forward.
In Cave 17, devoted largely to the good deeds of the brave and devout Prince Simhala — beginning with the shipwreck of his expedition to Sri Lanka and ending with his coronation there — the artists have entered into prodigious evocations of detail, including a particularly grisly image of a wounded soldier with his large intestine spilling out of his slashed midriff. Even Ishaan and Kanishk seemed momentarily to have mislaid their war lust at the sight. They moved silently along to another painting on an adjoining wall, a moving depiction of the legend of a captured elephant being returned to its blind parents.
This is art revealing a high level of technical skill, with a subtle use of shading and highlighting to achieve a three-dimensional effect. Often, the eyes of the painted subject seem to follow the viewer. There are curiosities: the women in the pictures are all dark, the men all fair, and it is not clear whether this was an artistic convention or the reflection of some ancient colonizing sensibility. With their varied themes, their sophisticated execution, and their vivid depictions of human and animal forms, the paintings of Ajanta made a tremendous impact across Asia, becoming a model for artists throughout the Buddhist world. But it isn't just their age or beauty that imprints the Ajanta paintings on our consciousness; it's their vitality, the energy and social acuity of their creators. Today their art is an invaluable record of the past, but in its time it had immediate validity as a depiction of what mattered in the world and of the images that drew the community together. To think of this stunning work being created, day after day in those precious moments of sunlight, back-breaking work with anonymity its only reward, is to sense the devotion of these artists to a higher calling than art itself.
We returned to Aurangabad after five hours, including a quick lunch, consuming the Taj's packed offerings in a gazebo a hundred steps below the cave level. Our patient porter had sensibly waited downstairs, rather than dog our footsteps as we climbed, and he laid claim to the gazebo before anyone else had the same idea. Oddly enough, there is no concession stand, let alone a restaurant, in the complex. Though there is no shortage of peddlers offering everything from postcards to samples of local rock, you have to bring your own food.
D. M. Yadav, the knowledgeable senior tourism official in Aurangabad, tried to talk us into extending our stay by another two days. He urged us not to leave Aurangabad without making two more excursions: to Paithan, two hours away, the old capital of the Satavahanas and seat of a legendary weaving tradition, famed throughout the ancient world, which still produces wondrous saris and other fine cloth; and to Lonar, a four-hour drive, the site where a meteorite struck the earth some fifty thousand years ago, leaving a crater with a radius of five kilometers. We had commitments in Bombay that obliged us to make our plane, though Minu pointedly observed that she had no Paithani sari in her collection. “And we have no fragments of meteorite, either, Ma,” Ishaan retorted.
Before boarding the aircraft, I did ask Yadav about the threatened closure of the caves to tourists. He seemed puzzled. “Why would we do that?” he asked. “People have been coming daily to Ellora for two thousand years, to Ajanta for somewhat less. Why stop them now?”