Here is the in depth study of Ajanta and Ellora caves by V R Narla
( Narla Venkateswararao)
Before your actual visit to Ajanta and Ellora you might have heard for years a good deal about their far farmed caves. You might have seen quite a few reproductions of their glorious paintings and sculptures. You might have even gobbled up what this art critic or that connoisseur had written in praise of them. With all this prior knowledge, you might have started on your journey with high expectations. And yet, neither Ananta nor Ellora will let you down. They are vibrant with beauty and grace and power far beyond the range of your highest expectations.
This, at any rate, has been my personal experience, and it is, I believe, also that of thousands of other visitors to these cave temples. Speaking strictly for myself, I cannot say the same thing of the many famous sights seen by me in my fairly extensive travels round the world. Besides Ajanta and Ellora, only Angkor Wat greatly exceeded, in magnitude and splendor, my mental picture of it.
Even in retrospect, I find it somewhat difficult to sort out my impressions of this renowned temple on the outskirts of Siam reap in Cambodia. Rising tire over tire, it soars into the sky; it is a structure that is vast, gigantic, stupendous. It is more a city than an edifice. In fact the literal meaning of Angkor Wat is “the temple city.” Like an overgrown metropolis bulging at its seems, it stuns you by its very size. You feel lost in its bewildering maze. Walking along miles and miles of its galleries or colonnades and viewing, however cursorily, the countless sculptures in low relief that adorn them, is a physical effort, which is likely to fatigue you unless you are young and robust. As in the case of the Niagara Falls, which I visited a little earlier, Angkor Wat is pervaded by something elemental, its neighbourly counterpart, the ancient royal city, Angkor – Thom, were (according to popular tradition) not men, but mythical giants.
Angkor Wat in Cambodia
The impact of Ajanta and Ellora on you is totally different. Here you feel that you are in the presence of something that is at once secular and sacred, intimate and ethereal. Nothing is outsize, nothing over whelming. Instead of being dazed as at Angkor Wat by the sheer weight of magnitude and profusion, you feel gently transported into a realm of art and poetry, into a world of dreams and visions. As you wander from one cave temple to another, a sense of awe and wonder, of peace and plenitude, settles on you.
Of Ajanta and Ellora, the former has been fortunate; it was abandoned totally and forgotten for about a thousand years. During this long period of oblivion, it was hidden from public view by forest trees that grew above and around its caves, and what was perhaps worse, the caves became the hideouts of predatory men and beasts. Many of the paintings of Ajanta and some of their sculptures have, in consequence, suffered irreparable damage. The story of the rediscovery of Ajanta is indeed very fascinating. Here is how Mukul Dey recounts it in his book My Pilgrimages to Ajanta and Bagh.
In the year 1819 a British officer, retired from the Madras Army, was out alone in the jungles close to the village of Ajanta on hunting expedition. Unsuccessful, he wound his way on and on through the wild stony tracks. Having pursued his haphazard course for some time, and, imagining himself far enough from human beings, he was surprised to hear but a little way off the shrill voice of a boy. Hastening his steps, te captain soon came up to a young person talking to his herd of half-wild buffaloes in the middle of the jungle.
The boy, seeing a European and consequently hoping to earn a little tip by showing him the actual home of the tigers, led him a little way from where he was standing and, pointed through the trees, said, “Look, Sahib”. Eagerly looking in the direction of the boy’s extended arm, he saw through the thick green foliage something, a little golden-red in colour, peering between a few mauve coloured stone – carved pillars or columns.
The captain, intensely excited, feeling that he was on the brink of making an important archaeological discovery, sent immediately to the village for men to come with torches and drums, with axes and spears, to hew down the tangled clusters that had throttled the entrance to the caves. Thus, a clearing was made in the jungle, and a passage forced into these long-forgotten cave-temples which had been hewn out of solid rock between the third century B.C. and the seventh century A.D.
As the army officer clambered up the steep bank of the Vaghora and stood before the cave temples, he must have felt as though a new and wondrous world has revealing itself to him. This, indeed, is the great thing about Ajanta; it bursts on you as a magnificent revelation. So does Ellora.
The caves at Ajanta are wholly Buddhistic, while those at Ellora are representative of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The caves at both the centres were excavated and adorned over centuries. Royal patronage for them was there in plenty, but it was the devotion and magnificence, love and labours of generations of religious men and their lay followers that helped to create them with all their beauty and splendor.
Without going into the details of the environs or the number and the lay-out of the Ajanta caves, I would like to refer here briefly to their great message, as it is understood by me. Try however much, you cannot run away from life. The Buddhist monks tried their best to run away from it by leaving their kith and kin, by forsaking their homes and hearths, by renouncing the world and all its pleasures and, finally, by shutting themselves up in a lonely glen with its little stream, Veghora. But still, life pursued tem relentlessly to claim every one of them as her own. The paintings of the Ajanta caves are there to proclaim this triumph of life. In practically every one of the frescoes you find life holding its court, attended not only by men but also by the denizens of the skies and the forests. In those assemblies gods and goddesses hold converse wit mortals; princes and princesses rub shoulders with peasants; birds and animals vie with each other in adding colour and animation to the scene. Here is pair of lovers looking into each other’s eyes; there a recluse turning is gaze inwards; elsewhere a mother finding her fulfillment in the child in her arms; everywhere life is bubbling with a new joy and breaking into a new song.
Besides this message of the triumph of life, Ellora offers you another too. There was a time when Hinduism, Buddhism, and Janinism clashed violently with one another to establish their individual ascendancy. This rivalry took a different form here in Ellora. Each of these religions tried at this spot to excel the other not in destructive but creative activity. Between them they have presented to posterity a total of 34 cave temples hewn out of the bowels of the solid rock. What a better world would ours be if only all the religions would compete likewise and all the time in what is essentially artistic and creative!
If I were to dwell on the individual excellences of the cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora, there is no knowing where I should stop. I will, therefore, confine myself to some general observations. As you visit one cave temple after another, you will often be transfixed by the figure of the Buddha with his eyes closed in deep meditation and yet peering with love and understanding into the innermost recesses of your heart. You will be entranced by one or another of the Bodhisattvas with his angelic face lit up wit a sweet smile of compassion abounding. You will be charmed by the celestial beauty of the Apsaras, amused by te sort and stodgy figures of the Yakshas and fascinated by the flying Gandharvas. Each of these joyful moments will live with you for ever as a priceless treasure.
As I have avoided details about the individual excellences of the cave temples, I am refraining from dwelling on other minor things such as, for instance, how to journey to Ajanta and Ellora or where to stay. Detailed information on these points can be easily gathered from the guide-books published by the Department of Tourism of the Government of India. I would, however, like to say on the basis of my own experience that the best time to visit
Ajantha and Ellora is towards the end of the rainy season. By then the fields are a vast sea of rich verdure, the sides of the rocks are lush with vegetation, and the whole prospect as you journey to the caves is a veritable feast to the eye. During this time you may have a few sparkling showers, making the weather cool, refresh, and bracing. Round about Deepavali, the festival of lights, is the best time to plan a visit to the cave temples.
Although the distance between Jalgaon and Ajanta is much shorter than between Aurangabad and Ajanta. I recommended the longer route. It passes over rolling hills and dales through a bewitching countryside, and your very journey through it is sure to put you in a better mood to see and to enjoy and to receive the profound message of Ajanta.
There are two more tips which I would like to give a visitor to Ajanta and Ellora. The present approach to the Ajanta caves is not the ancient one; in the olden times one had probably to wade through a part of the Vaghora river to climb up the steep stone steps, which are still there, to reach roughly the middle of the crescent in which are embedded the thirty caves. If you were to start at this point and work your way to either side, there would be a certain logical progression in the impressions formed by you. The caves now marked I and II are not the earliest; they were probably the last to be excavated and embellished. And they are by far the best, both for the wealth of their paintings and for the fine points of their architecture. If you were to see them first, the rest of your visit might be an anticlimax. You should, therefore, reserve these two caves to the very last.
In the case of Ellora, the procedure to be followed is just the reverse. Most people, beguiled by the local guides, begin their visit by visiting Cave XVI, famous as the Kailasa, which is roughly in the middle of the whole group. E.B.Havell says that it is “in some ways the most wonderful tour de force achieved by Indian sculptor-architects”. After the powerful impact of this marvelous creation, the rest of the sights tend to pall on you. So you should begin with Cave I and proceed unhurriedly until you reach Cave XXXIV. I know that not only many visitors to Ellora, but art critics and historians as well, hold that art and architecture found their best and fullest expression at Ellora in the Kailasa temple. But I, for one, would recommend more than causal attention to Cave XXIX. It is grand in conception and grander in execution. In my opinion, for what it is worth, it is the real Kailasa. Here you find the great Siva in every mood, from the most benign to the most terrible. “Sculpture”, according to a definition by Will Durant, “is motion immobilized, passion spent or controlled, beauty of form preserved from time by metal congealed or lasting stone.” As you gaze in awe at the great sculptures in this cave you will realize how true Durant’s definition is. I sometimes think that the creators of the Nataraja of Chidambaram and elsewhere owed their inspiration directly to the dancing Siva of Ellora. (1967)
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