Notas del episodio
In April 1819 a British cavalry officer named John Smith, out hunting tigers in Maharashtra, followed a local shepherd boy into a remote U-shaped gorge and found painted faces staring down from a vaulted ceiling. The local Bhil people already knew the site. Smith climbed a five foot mound of debris and scratched his name across a painted Buddhist figure, so after later excavation his graffiti now sits oddly high on the wall. The Ajanta Caves are 30 rock-cut Buddhist monasteries and worship halls cut into a 75 meter cliff of flood basalt. There is no masonry: viharas with monks' cells and cathedral-like chaitya halls with ribbed ceilings and stupas were carved as single pieces of the mountain, starting at the roofline and working downward so no scaffolding was needed.
An austere first phase dates to roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE. Art historian Walter Spink argued that nearly all of the second, lavish phase was cut in about 20 years, from 460 to around 480 CE, under Emperor Harishena of the Vakataka dynasty, judging by chisel marks, pillar designs, and unfinished caves. Harishena and his prime minister Varahadeva, both Hindu, funded these Buddhist masterpieces, and a Durga plaque found in a nearby brick monastery hints the workers were Hindu too. Work paused around 472 under threat from the Asmaka kings, and when Harishena died the royal money stopped. Poorer donors rushed in with small intrusive Buddha carvings before the artists and monks left and the jungle closed over the gorge for more than a thousand years.
- The top-down method: laborers lowering the floor while sculptors shaped pillars and painters worked above
- A dry fresco of mud, cow dung, and rice husks under lime plaster that kept colors alive in the damp
- The serene Padmapani bodhisattva with a blue lotus in Cave 1, commissioned by Harishena
- Why monastery walls show pearls, wine, dancers, and Prince Mahajanaka's wealth: to show what was renounced
- Conservators now protecting John Smith's 1819 vandalism as a marker of the site's rediscovery