Ajanta Caves

The Ajanta Caves are a group of about thirty Buddhist monasteries and prayer halls cut into a curving basalt cliff above the Waghur river in Aurangabad district, Maharashtra, in western India. They were made in two bursts of activity, the earlier from around the second century BCE onward and the later in the fifth century CE. Their wall paintings, which tell stories of the Buddha's earlier lives, form the largest body of ancient Indian mural painting to survive anywhere.

Caves 9, 10, 12, 13 and 15A make up the oldest group: two halls built around a stupa, known as chaitya-grihas, and three simple monastic halls, or viharas, lined with small cells for monks. The art historian Walter Spink placed them between about 100 BCE and 100 CE and linked them to the Satavahana dynasty, which ruled the region; other scholars prefer an earlier date in the time of the Maurya Empire. These early caves have no carved figures, and the stupa is the focus of worship. Inscriptions show that many separate donors paid for parts of a single cave to earn religious merit. The site seems then to have stood without new building for several centuries, though the Chinese pilgrim Faxian, travelling around 400 CE, recorded that Buddhists still visited it.

The second phase, associated with Mahayana Buddhism, produced the most elaborate caves, now numbered 1 to 8, 11 and 14 to 29. Here the plan changed: monasteries gained a shrine at the back holding a large carved Buddha, and columns, ceilings and facades were covered with sculpture and paint. When this happened is disputed. Older accounts spread the work across the fourth to seventh centuries. Spink argued instead for a short, intense campaign between about 460 and 480 CE under Harishena, king of the Vakataka dynasty, with courtiers such as the minister Varahadeva and the local sub-king Upendragupta commissioning individual caves. Scholars including Karl Khandalavala and Hans Bakker have argued for a longer chronology reaching into the sixth century, while the Archaeological Survey of India dates the peak of work to between the mid-fifth and mid-sixth centuries.

On Spink's reading, work was interrupted by attacks from the neighbouring Asmaka rulers and largely stopped after Harishena's death in 477, leaving several caves unfinished; small donors then added a scattering of extra statues and shrines. Inscriptions suggest that Harishena and his court, although generally regarded as Hindu, made Buddhist dedications, a reminder that patrons could honour both traditions. The painted scenes, done on dry plaster, show crowded palaces, processions and landscapes, and the two large bodhisattva figures in Cave 1 are among the best known images in Indian art. Literary sources show that painting was prized across the age of the Gupta Empire, but little of it survives outside Ajanta.

After the great patrons withdrew, the caves were not wholly forgotten. An inscription of the Rashtrakuta period in Cave 26 shows activity in the eighth or ninth century, and the seventh-century traveller Xuanzang described the site. The historian Richard Cohen interprets the evidence as showing occasional use without a settled monastic community. The Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abu al-Fazl at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, mentions twenty-four rock-cut temples here. Jungle later grew over the gorge, though local people knew the caves.

On 28 April 1819 John Smith, a British cavalry officer on a tiger hunt, was led by a shepherd boy to the mouth of Cave 10. He had villagers clear the jungle, and he scratched his name and the date across a painted bodhisattva. Within decades the caves had become famous, and artists were sent to copy the murals. Most of Robert Gill's copies perished in an 1866 fire at London's Crystal Palace, and over a hundred of the canvases made by John Griffiths and his students were lost in a museum fire in 1885.

During the colonial period the site lay in the princely state of Hyderabad rather than British India. In the 1920s the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, brought in Italian restorers and built a road for visitors, efforts that Cohen judges to have hastened deterioration. The caves were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983, alongside the nearby Ellora Caves. Crowding threatens the fragile paintings, and in 2012 the state tourism corporation announced full-size replicas of four of the painted caves at the visitor centre to relieve pressure on the originals.