The Murals of the Ajanta Caves

The Ajanta Caves are thirty chambers cut into the rock face of a horseshoe-shaped gorge in the Deccan Plateau, where waterfalls sound when the river is high. The chambers are monasteries and worship halls, carved and painted by Buddhist communities over a span of roughly seven hundred years, in two distinct phases. The earlier phase began around the second century BCE. The later phase is less securely dated: older accounts placed it between 400 and 650 CE, while later scholarship has argued for a much shorter window, between 460 and 480 CE. The disagreement is not trivial, but the chambers themselves are silent on the matter.

The caves served as monsoon retreats for monks, and as resting places for merchants and pilgrims travelling through the region. Textual records mention them, and medieval Chinese Buddhist travellers wrote about visiting them. Then the jungle grew over the entrance to the gorge, and the caves were lost to contemporary knowledge until 1819, when a British officer named John Smith, hunting tiger, stumbled on the rock face and the doorways cut into it.

What makes Ajanta notable is not the caves themselves but what is painted on their walls. Historical records make it clear that mural painting was widespread in ancient India, but almost none of it survives. The murals in Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 at Ajanta form the largest corpus of surviving ancient Indian wall painting. They depict scenes from the Jataka tales, which recount the Buddha's past lives and rebirths, and scenes from other Buddhist narratives. They also depict figures of Bodhisattvas and deities, painted not as flat icons but as modelled forms.

The technique is tempera on prepared rock. The stone surface was chiselled smooth, then covered with layers of mud, cow dung, chopped rice husk and lime plaster to create a ground that would take paint. The pigments were mineral and organic: ochres, lamp black, lapis lazuli for blue. The painters worked in layers, beginning with an underdrawing, then blocking in areas of local colour, then modelling the forms with lighter and darker tones to describe how light would fall on a three-dimensional body. Over the top of that modelled surface, they redrew the contours in dark line. The result is a hybrid: the figures have volume, described by shading, and they have edges, described by drawn boundaries. Both systems are visible at once.

The technique is not unique to Ajanta, but the survival is. What remains shows a command of foreshortening, of overlapping forms to suggest depth, and of modelling to suggest mass. The painters understood how to make a flat surface read as a body in space. They also understood how to use a face. The Bodhisattva Padmapani, painted on the wall of Cave 1, does almost nothing. He stands, weight on one leg, head tilted, eyes downcast. He holds a lotus loosely in one hand. The gaze does not meet the viewer's. It is directed downward and away, and the tilt of the head and the fall of light across the cheek convey an interior state without gesture or drama. It is painting that knows how much can be carried by restraint.