If there is any place that completely defies expectations it must be Ajanta.
We grow up reading about this place in our school textbooks, it figures in superlative terms when people discuss art and architecture, and it is even the name adopted by a popular brand of wall-clocks...and yet we know so little about the people who built this amazing complex of excavated temples - Chaitya's and Viharas - over a span of eight centuries, from 200 BCE to 600 CE!
Our journey started last month with a de-hypenation. Rarely is this site mentioned by itself - it is always paired as Ajanta-Ellora. So I had always thought that this was some kind of twin-site like Hyderabad-Secundrabad or Kochi-Ernakulam. It is only when I started looking up the logistics of our week-long visit to Aurangabad that I discovered the length of this particular hyphen - 103 km!
This is not a place for folks in a hurry. There are indeed tourists who fly into Aurangabad (the nearest airport) and do a day trip covering Ajanta, Ellora and even the fort at Devgiri (Daulatabad) but these trips can only be shallow and superficial. All the more so if you land up at Ajanta without a good guide.
Also, there are no good hotels close to Ajanta so like most tourists, we had to stay at Aurangabad and start out early morning for a two-hour road journey to the site. We were however very fortunate to get an excellent driver (Madhukar Kohli), who in his own quiet, gentle way, gave us the option of going to the regular entry point directly, or to approach it from the 'view-point' (an 15 km extra). He also suggested we take a guide from Balapur, the point where the road diverges to the view-point.
This guide was a youngster, a 12th-pass-aspiring-licensed-guide. He led us to this sweeping panorama -
Looking down from the undulating plains is the famous horseshoe-shaped valley created by the Waghora river. This was the view seen by an East India Company soldier who came here on a hunt in 1819, and saw a tiger disappear into a cave in the thick forest below. The cliff-turned out to be a vast complex of excavated Buddhist shrines and monasteries that had been forgotten since the time it was abandoned some time in 700 CE.
The stone is mostly hard volcanic basalt and layered like a cake. At one end of the valley, the river cuts through these layers in a cascade of seven waterfalls, and curves away further down the plateau. It is here that generations of Buddhist monks chipped away at the rocks, generation after generation, a space where they could congregate and meditate. The acoustics of the temple halls is quite amazing.
It is one thing to cut through solid stone to create and build a quiet place for prayers, and quite another to embellish it with sculptures and intricate paintings!
According to our guide the oldest caves - 9, 10, 12 and 13 - have paintings that use only five vegetable colours. The later ones have the additional distinct blue hue of lapiz lazuli which presumably was brought in from distance places in Central Asia. This may also explain why some caves have depictions of people who are distinctly mongoloid, as well as brown-bearded and trousered Persians.
The intensity of activity you see in the paintings leaves you with so many questions - what was the purpose of recreating a world in such exquisite detail by monks who came here to renounce all attachments? How did the monks sustain themselves? As in the case of Sanchi, which is at a safe distance from the ancient city of Vidisha, which is the nearest city where the monks went to beg of alms? Were they completely dependent on the generosity of kings or did they grow their own food?
There is nothing on the site that offers more information. As is the case in most sites under the control of the ASI, here too you have a bunch of shabby shops selling kitsch and cool drinks, the vendors go about trying to sell mediocre guidebooks and informal guides do their bit to make a muddle of site that certainly deserves the attention drawn by sites like the Humanyun's tomb in New Delhi.
---------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES & NOTES
