Ajanta Caves

Ajanta contains the finest surviving painting of the ancient Indian world, and its two building phases are separated by roughly six hundred years of silence.

The first phase

From about the second century BCE, under Satavahana patronage: a small group of caves, cut as monastic halls and shrines.

These are pre-Mahayana, and the crucial thing about them is what they do not contain. There is no Buddha image. The teacher is indicated by symbols, an empty throne, a pair of footprints, a parasol, a wheel, the bodhi tree.

This is not artistic incapacity. The same craftsmen carved crowds of human figures. It reflects a period in which representing the Buddha's person was not done, and the earliest Buddhist art across India observes the same restraint.

Anyone who wants to see what a religion looks like before it decides its founder may be depicted can see it at Ajanta, in the same cliff as what came after.

The second phase

Then nothing, for centuries. Then, under Vakataka patronage in the fifth century, an explosion of work: the great painted caves, full of Buddha figures, bodhisattvas, and enormous narrative compositions.

This is Mahayana, and the change is total. The Buddha is everywhere, attended by bodhisattvas who did not exist in the earlier scheme.

Spink's dating

Walter Spink compressed the entire second phase into roughly 460 to 480, some twenty years, tying the sequence to the reign of the Vakataka king Harishena and to the political collapse that followed his death.

The compression is aggressive and specialists have criticised it. It has nonetheless become the standard framework in general accounts of Indian art, largely because it explains the site's most striking feature: the work stops abruptly and unfinished. Chisels down mid-cave, sculptures half-cut, paintings incomplete.

Something ended the patronage suddenly, and everyone left.

The paintings

The wall paintings are the reason Ajanta matters beyond Buddhist history. Court scenes, processions, animals, dancers, and the jataka stories of the Buddha's previous lives, in compositions crowded with people who are individually characterised.

Almost nothing else of the kind survives anywhere in India. Indian painting of this period is otherwise known mostly from literary description, and Ajanta is close to the entire surviving corpus.

They are also fragile, and the twentieth-century interventions, varnishes applied by early restorers among them, did real damage.

Rediscovery

The gorge closed over the caves after the site was abandoned. A British officer, John Smith, came upon them on a tiger hunt in 1819 and left his name scratched on a painted figure in cave ten, which is still there.

The Archaeological Survey administers the site. It is no longer a place of worship.

Ajanta was found again by accident, by a British officer supposedly out hunting tigers, who left his own name carved on a pillar to prove it.

Found by a hunting party

British army officer John Smith is credited with rediscovering the caves for the colonial record in 1819, reportedly while pursuing a tiger through the ravine and glimpsing the carved facades through overgrown vegetation. He is said to have carved his name and the date onto a pillar inside one cave, a mark that reportedly survived for some time afterward as an unofficial record of the rediscovery, though the caves had never been unknown to the local population living nearby.

Painting rather than only carving

Ajanta is distinguished among Buddhist rock-cut sites by extensive surviving wall paintings, depicting Jataka tales of the Buddha's previous lives alongside courtly and devotional scenes, executed in a naturalistic style using mineral pigments on a mud and plaster ground. The paintings are widely regarded as among the finest surviving examples of ancient Indian art and have influenced study of painting traditions across South and Southeast Asia.

An abandonment without a clear cause

Excavation and use of the caves appears to have ceased by around the seventh century, with no single confirmed explanation; proposed causes include shifting trade routes that had supported the monastic community, declining royal patronage, and broader changes in the region's religious landscape as Buddhism's presence in India receded over subsequent centuries.