Chambers Of Secrets: The Caves Of Ajanta & Alora

Not for nothing are the Ajanta and Ellora caves world-renowned. Even repeated visits do not dim the beauty of these 64 caves.

- Hema Narayanan

The Jataka Tales are indelibly etched in my mind, being favourite reading when I was a child. These stories were full of Buddhist ideals yet, laced with humour, they were entertaining and unforgettable. The life of the Buddha has been a fascinating Indian perennial and the Jataka Tales are a voluminous narrative of his previous births, his lives in both human and animal form and the future Buddha.

And so, when I first set foot in the gorge around the Ajanta caves, I was enveloped by a sense of the miraculous— as if the stories I had read as a child were going to come alive in these caves. The Buddha’s glorious life and times are narrated through illustrative forms such as paintings, sculptures, carvings and inscriptions—all on a vast scale and with stupendous magnificence.

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness,” said Frank Gehry. And the Ajanta and Ellora caves are a standing testimony to the timelessness of India’s heritage. Located in Aurangabad in Maharashtra, they are one of India’s best-preserved sites and are on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

AJANTA

The Ajanta caves date from the second century to about 480 CE. Abandoned in the fifth century and unknown for close to 1,400 years, except perhaps to the local Bhils,this magnificent monument of architecture and art was rediscovered in 1819. A young British cavalry officer, John Smith, and his British soldiers, on a tiger hunt, accidentally discovered the Ajanta caves. Spotting the mouth of a cave high above the Waghora stream, they thought that it could only be man-made, at that height. So they scrambled up, entered the cave with a flaming grass torch and came upon a colonnaded hall, superbly vaulted with faded paintings on its walls. Beneath a dome, Smith saw a statue of a praying Buddha. This was the rediscovery of Ajanta.