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5 November 2006 -
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The Holy caves of India He must have been amazed. It would have been hot, as it always seems to be in this eastern part of the Indian state of Maharashtra. The land ahead of him would have been much as it is today -- fairly flat, dusty, yellow, featureless, tricked out with thick scrub and forests of mimosa and tamarind trees. He was a soldier, and his fellow officers would have been behind him, keeping as quiet as they could and well downwind of their prey, a thus far unseen tiger. Then there was a gap in the scrub, the land fell away, and down, down, well below the eyeline, there lay, unexpected, a winding and noisily rushing river. Beyond it, filling his view, rose a cliff that was marked indelibly and incredibly with a horizontal tidemark of large and oddly shaped apertures, caves, perhaps, carved by water or winds. Or on second sight maybe not, since the openings seemed more like doorways, doorways carved and fretworked into the cliff-face stone. He must have been amazed. He was named John Smith, he was a captain in the Madras Army, and he would have remained an almost forgotten British imperial figure but for a single scratched graffito that he left high on a basalt pillar in one of these caves, with, in perfectly legibly incised copperplate, his name and the date, April 1819. This small moment of recorded vandalism marks this otherwise unsung soldier as the first European discoverer of an ancient construction that still, nearly 200 years on, has the power to utterly astound and astonish those who see it for the first time. The monument comprises a series of 29 caves that have been carved deep into this sheer face of a horseshoe-shaped cliff a few miles from the old walled town of Ajanta, hidden away in the deep gorge gouged in the high Deccan plains by the Waghora River about 300 miles inland from Mumbai. It is a Unesco World Heritage Site, designated as such back in 1983 as one of India's first, along with the Taj Mahal. And though Shah Jahan's famous memorial in Agra is far better known, the Ajanta Caves are hugely popular, particularly with Indians, who see them as eloquent testimony to their country's immense and unbroken history. The caves can in consequence become insufferably crowded. But I went in March, the lowest of the low seasons -- the schools hadn't closed for spring break and the weather, though warm, wasn't as hot as most Indian travelers prefer. There were so few people around that it sometimes seemed as though the tourists were outnumbered by the monkeys, who gathered in troops up in the neem trees, gazing down at the scattering of humans who wandered, in rapt attention, in and out of great gaping holes in the high walls of the cliff. And while it is what is inside the caves that these days attracts most interest -- and controversy, since, within, there are memorably beautiful mural paintings and images fully 2,000 years old and more -- the simple, most astonishing fact remains that these caves are, in the very truest sense, and just as the captain suspected, entirely human constructions. They are not merely occupied or used by humans. They were not the consequence of any geological accident. They were carved, and everything within them was carved as well. Each one of these enormous caverns was hollowed from the flint-hard rock by hand. Every single pillar, statue, elephant, Buddha and griffon inside is the original rock, previously undisturbed deep within the cliff: the three-dimensionality of each object was fashioned by ancient stonemasons working their way painstakingly around and beside and beneath each imagined sculpture-to-be, creating space from rock, and leaving these magnificent subterranean monuments behind as they chipped the caves away. Inside, today's visitors find guides with flashlights, essential in the gloom of the deeper caves to help them understand the complexity of the story. While in some seasons the guides must attend to a crush of visitors, it was seldom that I encountered more than three other people in any one cave, and in Cave 10, one of the oldest and largest, there was no one other than the guide, a Mr. Malhotra. We do not know for sure if Captain Smith fully realized, on that spring day in 1819 when he and his hunting party first chanced upon the site, how the caves had been constructed. Legend has it that they were out hunting tigers in the Sahyadri Hills when they came to the Waghora, at a place where it rounded a tight and tortured semicircle, its waters roaring down to a seven-tiered waterfall at the canyon end. But we do know that he and his men forded the river and clambered, very dangerously, up the sheer and slippery lava cliffs and up to the mouths of some of the caverns. They peered cautiously inside, using torches they had crudely fashioned from fascicles of wild grasses. And then they were able to see, just as Howard Carter was to see, when he peered into his newly opened cave in Egypt a century later, just ''wonderful things wonderful things.'' There were statues of animals, ornate pillars, Buddha figures, soaring roofs of what seemed like stone cathedrals -- and on all the walls and some of the ceilings, paintings, brilliantly colored mural paintings of dazzling complexity and loveliness. Today's tourists see all of this from a walkway that winds around the cliff at the caves' floor level, preserving visitors from the vertiginous drop into the river. Once back in Madras, Captain Smith reported his find to his superior officers, and eventually the news reached the Royal Asiatic Society in London, whereupon a buzz of excitement broke out among the soldiers and administrators who were able to find their way to such a remote part of India. In short order it became the fashion to try to find the Waghora Valley and its extraordinary secret gorge. There are in the archives accounts from the small number of men who succeeded, men like Lt. James Alexander of the 16th Lancers, who visited in 1824 and -- well aware of the dangers posed locally by the very fierce Bhil tribesmen, the ''stony-hearted robbers'' who, he was warned ''will destroy you'' -- dressed himself up as a local, strapping on sabers, pistols and hunting spears as protection. He clambered up the cliff and into the first cave: he found ''a foetid smell arising from numerous bats the remains of a recent fire the entire skeleton of a man prints of the feet of tigers, jackals, bears, monkeys, peacocks etc., impressed into the dust formed by the plaster of the fresco paintings which had fallen from the ceiling.'' He reached a safe spot to sit in the sun, and there, gazing out over the river, he smoked a bidi and found himself moved -- for seemingly he was an educated man -- to quote Horace, the ode that begins ''quae non imber edax non aquilo impotens '' -- ''cannot be destroyed by gnawing rain or wild north wind, by the procession of unnumbered years or by the flight of time.'' Before long, scholars were flocking to the caves, hauling themselves up on ropes, inching along tiny ledges fit for mountain goats, the river roaring far below. Though decades later five Buddha heads stolen from Ajanta made their way to a sale at Sotheby's -- and are now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- the caves remained largely intact as these early-19th-century visitors puzzled over what they had found. The Bhils, when they could be persuaded to set aside their bows and poison-tipped arrows, insisted that the caves were Hindu and that some of them still provided homes to their own living gods. But the academics thought otherwise. By the middle of the 19th century it was agreed that these were Buddhist caves, fashioned for two basic purposes. Some were monasteries, the so-called viharas, where monks could go to live in quiet and solitude (and escape from the foul weather of the monsoon). Others were chaityas, cathedral-like halls of worship, where the Buddha or a symbol of his spirituality (for in very early times any representation of him was banned) could be revered in public and with ceremony. The artwork in some of the caves suggested they originated in the second century B.C. Gradually, the story of the making of the Ajanta Caves became clear. Though interpretations of the details have been many and controversial (not least thanks to the outspoken and contrary scholarship of a University of Michigan art history professor, Walter Spink, who has devoted most of his long life to the Buddhist art of northern India), the basic story now seems to be agreed upon. In ancient days the village of Ajanta stood athwart a trade route -- the main Delhi-Mumbai railway passes close by today, essentially following the same path. (A few visitors to the caves disembark from trains at Jalgaon station, 40 miles away; most, however, fly into Aurangabad, 60 miles away, but with better hotels.) About 2,200 years ago, when a dynasty of aristocrats known as the Satavahanas was in power in this corner of India, and when the doctrines of the Buddha were enthusiastically accepted, a group of wealthy merchants decided to sponsor the carving of a small number of cave monasteries and cave temples for the use of priests and mendicants who used the route. (The tradition extended in time through much of the Buddhist world: vast numbers of caves have been carved, for instance, into the side of a cliff in Dunhuang, on the Chinese Silk Road, where scholars are fascinated to note that the earliest Buddhas have Indian facial features). Stone carvers set out to work. They first made themselves secure by belaying themselves from ropes anchored high up on the cliffs, lowered themselves perhaps a hundred feet down from the lip, and started chipping away into the rock face, beginning high up, fashioning what would in time become the cave's roof. Once they had incised a narrow letter-box-like opening a hundred or so feet into the cliff, they began to carve downward. But they didn't simply cut downward to make an enormous void. They had planned something far more complex, and so in their descending journey they deliberately left uncarved parts of the rock that would in time become shaped into pillars, elephants, camels and other creatures. The rock was very hard: the process of carving the bare stubs of the cave-inhabitants and cave-menageries and cave-furniture would take many years to complete. But eventually the carving was done, whereupon the painters moved in. These were artists who were ordered either to paint the statues, or parts of them or, more importantly, to create painting on the roofs and walls of the caves. This they did with great flamboyance and bravura, while using a palette of only six colors, all of them natural -- red and yellow ochre, black and white, malachite green and a blue of crushed lapis lazuli, found in abundance nearby. They poured pools of water into shallow depressions they had made in the floors to act as mirrors, to help reflect outside sunlight up onto the dark ceilings on which they painted. They produced murals, not frescoes, the plaster on which they applied their paint having to be dry, not wet, with the consequence that the paintings have an extraordinary fragility. Today's visitors are warned ceaselessly not to touch them; some are protected with layers of shellac; others have glass or plastic shields in place; a distressing number remain ruined, damaged by careless visitors of the last century. The pictures that are intact are breathtakingly lovely -- the artists painted with extraordinary delicacy and dexterity beautiful, full-breasted young women, peacocks, horses, flowers, deer -- everything except the Buddha, which in those days was proscribed in imagery. As has happened so often to rulers in Indian history, the Satavahanas eventually went into a decline. Hinduism became locally dominant, and for three centuries there was no further activity at the site. Chinese travelers who had already noted the splendor of the caves in the gorges now reported back home to their Emperor that the local people ''do not know the Law of the Buddha.'' But by the fifth century A.D., all had changed once again. The Vakataka dynasty was in power, and the great emperor Harisena -- ''probably the most illustrious ruler in the world in his own day,'' in Mr. Spink's words -- supported the creation of yet more monasteries and places of worship, adding in his time a further 23 caves to the 6 already made. Cave by cave by cave, important donors and sponsors were co-opted by Harisena to produce decorations and statuary -- with, this time, the Buddha being fully amenable to representation, and so there are many images of him and his bodhisattvas -- that would in time come to represent the fullest flowering of Indian classical art during one of its most energetic periods of creativity. And then Harisena died, there was turbulence and small wars, and by A.D. 480 the period of carving and painting and creation was over. The trade routes moved elsewhere; the cave makers moved east to Ellora and began a new set of monuments of equivalent majesty; the Buddhist monks -- who in any case were to be compelled to leave India eventually, when Buddhism was proscribed in the seventh century -- abandoned their clifftop refuges. The neem trees and the mimosas took over, the jungle reclaimed the cliffsides, and the caves became home to animals and parrots, and to occasional wandering sadhus. The Ajanta Caves languished, silent and forgotten and essentially unvisited, for almost a millennium and a half, until Captain Smith and his tiger hunters of the Madras Army fetched up there in the spring of 1819. Thanks in large measure to their Unesco World Heritage designation, and given the very evident pride displayed both by the Indian government and the state of Maharashtra, there is a forceful attempt to preserve and protect the caves. Cars and buses are kept a mile away, there are no hawkers' stalls allowed. A keen vigilance is maintained to make as certain as possible that visitors are respectful and careful, and that no one loots the monument of its priceless treasures; the guides with their flashlights act as sentries as well. Visitors pad quietly about in bare feet, asked to leave their shoes outside to protect the cave floors. Mr. Malhotra, my guide in Cave 10, close to the middle of the horseshoe-shaped array, addressed me with hushed awe about the age and scale of the immense columns -- and then of the great central stupa, with its enormous and genially serene Buddha. The cave itself was 2,000 years old; the Buddha had been added maybe 600 years later. It was an awe-inspiring thought: for 1,400 years -- while mankind beyond had been cursed by the Black Death, had been engaging in the Crusades, had been creating vast empires, had founded the New World, had fought Napoleon in endless wars -- the caves had gone undisturbed, unfound, unknown. I mentioned this to Mr. Malhotra. Amazing, didn't he think? Quite so, he replied and then he beckoned me to come deeper into the cave. He took me to the very back, to a wall far behind the stupa. Here the sunlight from the doorway had little perceptible effect, and it was difficult to make out much, so he directed the yellow and flickering beam of his torch to a point high up on the rock wall. And there, incised in Victorian copperplate, was more graffiti: ''John Smith,'' it said, and then in a more florid hand, a flourish of typographical exuberance, ''April 1819.'' He was the first one to see it, chuckled Mr. Malhotra. Nearly two centuries ago. Can you imagine? He was out hunting tigers and then he came across this. He must have been amazed. India is rolling
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