Ajanta

The Ajanta caves are 30 rock-cut Buddhist monasteries carved into a horseshoe cliff above the Waghora river, containing the finest surviving examples of ancient Indian painting — works of such quality that they influenced Buddhist art across Asia for the next thousand years.

Cave 1, the most celebrated, contains two full-figure paintings of Bodhisattvas — Vajrapani and Padmapani — that demonstrate, in their rendering of complex emotion through subtle modulation of facial expression and body posture, a psychological sophistication in figural painting that the Indian tradition would not exceed. The paintings were made using local natural pigments — lapis lazuli, malachite, ochre — applied to a preparation of clay, cow dung, and plant fibres on the cave walls.

The site was abandoned in the late 6th or 7th century and rediscovered by British officers on a tiger hunt in 1819, at which point the paintings were in considerably better condition than they are now. The century and a half of exposure, beginning with early 19th-century attempts to copy the paintings using methods that inadvertently damaged them, has cost the site much of what the tiger hunters found. What remains is still extraordinary; what was lost is the more sobering calculation.

Places to Visit in Ajanta

• Ajanta Cave paintings
• Viewpoint above the gorge
• Cave 1 and Cave 26 highlights

Things to Do in Ajanta

• Ancient mural and fresco viewing
• Gorge viewpoint trek
• Guided cave-by-cave history tour