Asia > India > Maharashtra > Ajanta > Ancient History > Articles > Cities of the Gods: The Glory of Ajanta and Ellora

Imagine a rock carving so huge that it took 7000 labourers working in continuous shifts some 150 years to complete. Such is the awesome engineering of the Kailas Temple at Ellora, in western India.

Ellora and its sister temple "caves" at Ajanta are far from household terms beyond India, although both are World Heritage-listed. Located not far from Aurangabad in Maharashtra state, these ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Jain religious complexes aren't actual caves but (officially speaking) "rock-cut monumental sculptures".

Around 2000 years ago, forgotten sages picked out favourable temple sites at these rock cliffs. From then on, generations of disciples laboured with hand tools to hew giant temples, intricate statues and monasteries of up to three storeys. The result — cities of the gods.

With my guide "Tiger" Wagh I drive out to Ellora, 30 kilometres from Aurangabad, to a quiet, monsoon-lush valley where 12 Buddhist temples (550-750 A.D) sit side by side with 17 Hindu ones (600-875 A.D) and five Jain shrines (800-1000 A.D.). Unlike later religious zealots, none of these tolerant builders felt the need to obliterate the icons sacred to their fellow religions.

The Buddhist shrines are fairly austere, while the Hindu temples are highly embellished, their highlight (and the central attraction of Ellora) being the grand Kailas Temple. Chiselled from one massive rock, and open to the sky, this great prayer in stone to the god Shiva includes a gateway, pavilions, galleries, inner sanctum and tower.

Kailas is probably the largest monolith ever sculpted: 20 million tonnes of stone were excavated, by hand, leaving a central monolith 52 metres long, 32 metres wide and 30 metres high. The master masons carved almost every centimetre of the central shrine's surfaces with religious reliefs.

Next day, we venture out again, to cover the 106 kilometres from Aurangabad to Ajanta. En route, Tiger tells me how the caves, after 900 years of construction (200 BC to 700 AD) dropped from human memory, sleeping undisturbed for another epoch, until rediscovered in 1819 by a group of British officers out on a tiger hunt.

Like the creations at Ellora, Ajanta's 30 caves were conjured from solid rock by monks and artisans — but there is no sense here of ‘seen one rock temple, you've seen them all’. Ajanta's setting alone is unique: a horseshoe-shaped rock escarpment of over half a kilometre in circumference that looks down into a green river valley, fed by (as my guidebook deftly puts it) "a waterfall of seven leaps". It was this crescent of rock that the ancient master builders transformed into a swiss cheese of 25 viharas (monasteries) and five chaityas (chapels).
Huge assembly halls, once packed with monks and scholars, run deep into the mountainside. Their columns and pillars are flanked by larger than life statues of Bodhisattva saints. Natural light floods in to illuminate murals and reliefs and carvings of Buddhas, beasts, nobles and even naughty children. This is like the cinema of the 6th Century, proto-comic strips, showing the recurrent archetypes of our human story.

Even the temple's depictions of women seem familiar in their voluptuousness — although these are emblems of fertility, not "Playmate of the Century, 700 A.D." I wander from room to chapel through a mural-covered world. Tiger reminds me that the painters here were using perspective techniques some nine centuries before they appeared in European painting.

A day at Ajanta is both not enough and overwhelming. Anything as ancient as these sites is, by nature, fragile: human-made through vast effort, they are equally "human-destroyable" through little effort at all. Perspex screens now protect some murals against touching and graffiti; flash photography is prohibited. (Ajanta's attendants shine temporary floodlights upon the statues for photographers.) Nature too is doing its bit to erode the galleries, with water penetration and chipping of the rock.

The Indian and Japanese governments are undertaking a major conservation plan for the complexes, but the current 350,000 annual visitors may be unsustainable. The humidity generated by the breath of sightseers is a major corrosion-generating factor. Should you visit, look hard but breath softly.

Articles

• More from John Borthwick
• More on the same theme