Ajanta In Peril

The world-famous ancient cave murals in Maharashtra stare at ruin due to debatable preservation and display techniques and unbridled tourism. How can we save these millennia-old artistic wonders?

- Sunil Menon

The battle against mortality, in a sense, is inscribed into the very foundational scrolls of Ajanta. An anxiety of perishing haunts and animates the 5th-century Buddhist monk’s words—aspiring to the eternal, without a trace of irony, in two worlds at once. Over 1,500 years later, that same dread hangs like an invisible nimbus cloud over this little wooded nook of the northern Deccan near Aurangabad in Maharashtra. It might as well: this is a place with no match in the world. On a sheer basalt cliff-face draped around a horseshoe bend of the Waghora river, here stand 30 rock-cut caves of intriguingly graded complexity and beauty. An aesthetic universe that’s still only disclosing the secrets lying strewn amidst its stupa designs, curiously evolving floor plans, tiny bas-reliefs and colossal statuary almost liberating itself from rock, exquisitely finished facades and unfinished cells. Clues, hiding in its dim light, that can substantially alter our views on Indian history—the dynamics of power, religion and art as the curtains came down on its Ancient Age.