“In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party was heading through thick jungle near Aurangabad when the tiger they were tracking disappeared into the chasm of a deep ravine.” With that romantic and somewhat Indiana Jones-like opening, William Dalrymple begins his Foreword to this new and updated edition of Benoy K Behl’s classic The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Buddhist Paintings of India.
The Ajanta caves consist of 29 rock-cut cave monuments in West-Central India, a couple hundred kilometers east and somewhat north of Mumbai in Maharashtra. They were executed in two phases in the second century BCE and then at the end of the fifth century CE. Although the caves contain (and are themselves) notable carvings, they are mostly noted for their murals, “some,” writes Dalrymple,
of the most beautiful and ancient paintings in Buddhist art. Most of these dated from the fifth century CE, an otherwise lost Golden Age of Indian painting. Along with the frescoes of Pompeii and the delicate murals of Livia’s Garden House outside Rome, Ajanta’s walls represented perhaps the most comprehensive depiction of civilized courtly life to survive from antiquity anywhere in the world.
Although Xuanzang, the famous Chinese pilgrim of the early seventh century, made a record of them, the caves, astoundingly, seem to have been lost for centuries if not the better part of a millennium.
The Ajanta Caves, as is Thames & Hudson’s wont, focuses on the illustrations. The primary rationale for this new edition, a quarter-century after it was first published, would seem to be that Behl had, in the interim, “digitally restored” his earlier photographs and these are published here for the first time. (These restorations were done in pre-AI years; somewhat inevitably, there have been more recent news reports that artificial intelligence is being used for the same purpose.)
Art is rarely ever separable from its context: although Behl does discuss the paintings as art—composition, line, technique—he is relatively more loquacious when it comes to what the paintings represent: the life of the Buddha and the Jataka tales.
The variety of subject matter in these stories gave the painters ample scope to depict the entire canvas of life on earth. The walls are peopled by men, women and children, rich and poor, in towns and villages, engaged in all kinds of everyday activities.
Behl, indeed, isn’t shy about expressing his views on the religion:
The wondrous site of Ajanta is the most beautiful blossoming of Buddhist art and also represents the last record in the development of this compassionate religion before it lost its warm simplicity to esoteric influences and became a highly organized religious order with a large pantheon of deities…
or in making moral comparisons: the people in the paintings
are seen to be concerned about what happens to others. There is the exchange of looks, warm and caring. There is also the directness of the gentle human touch, expressed in a manner which is largely lost in modern society …
This enthusiasm leads Behl to make statements which are more inferential than he admits:
Individual artists may or may not have been Buddhists, but each is a bhikshu (one who has renounced worldly attachments to pursue his spiritual search). Hence, he is humble before all the creatures of the world… Indeed the painter was devout, but his devotion was through his art, not limited by the boundaries of any one faith or religion.
There is in fact no documentary evidence about who the painters were.
But in the end, the artwork speaks for itself. Behl is eloquent about its underlying humanity and how the works still communicate across the centuries. He excels at pointing out the details that might otherwise be missed: a cherub, a line of ants climbing a stick, playing monkeys, a detail of a kitchen scene in which a woman pushes back her hair with “the side of her hand as the fingers would be covered with spices”, string of pearls that convey movement.
Ajanta also constitutes a historical document, as Dalrymple notes in his introduction:
There is also a surprisingly international cast of characters in the murals. Recognizable among the crowds are many foreign Buddhists, including Parthians, Scythians, Ethiopians and possibly even Greeks, each with distinct clothes, hairstyles and skin tones. Even the pigments used in the paintings indicate international connections – the gorgeous blue, for example, was obtained from lapis lazuli imported from Badakhshan. Ajanta was evidently built at the centre of a deeply globalized world.
The book concludes with detailed descriptions and plans and an Appendix of “Early Descriptions of the Ajanta Caves and their Discovery” (extracts from the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society), information which, if one looked for it, might be available online.