Ajanta Cave Paintings

For roughly a thousand years, the painted caves of Ajanta sat forgotten, overtaken by the jungle growing across the horseshoe-shaped cliff that contains them, their entrances hidden from the surrounding countryside and unknown even to most people living nearby. Buddhist monastic use of the site had ended by around the seventh century CE, and without a resident community to maintain them, the caves and the paintings inside them simply disappeared from general memory.

Their return to wider knowledge came about by accident. On April 28, 1819, a hunting party of British officers from the Madras Presidency, tracking a tiger through the forest above the Waghora River, stumbled onto what turned out to be the arched facade of one of the caves, cut into the cliff and partially concealed by vegetation. Captain John Smith, a member of the party, is recorded as having climbed up to investigate, and, in a gesture that reads very differently now than it likely did to him at the time, carved his own name and the date directly into a sculpture inside the cave he entered, a mark still visible on the stone today, an inadvertent record of the exact moment a major site of ancient Buddhist art re-entered the historical record.

What Smith and his companions had found was not one cave but thirty, spanning roughly seven centuries of construction and containing, among carved sculpture, wall paintings substantially older and more extensive than anything comparable then known to have survived in India, a discovery whose full scholarly and artistic significance only became clear over the decades of study that followed.

Once the Ajanta paintings became known to the wider world after their 1819 rediscovery, the obvious concern was how fragile they were, tempera on mud plaster, exposed for centuries to moisture, smoke and the slow damage of neglect. In 1844, the East India Company commissioned Major Robert Gill, an army officer with a talent for painting, to spend years producing careful full-scale copies of the murals, intended partly as a scholarly record and partly as a hedge against the originals eventually being lost.

That precaution failed in a way nobody in 1844 could have anticipated. Gill's completed copies were shipped to London and displayed at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, and in December 1866 a fire tore through the building, destroying the vast majority of his work in a single night, an ironic loss given that the copies had been made specifically to guard against the originals themselves disappearing.

A second, more extensive copying campaign followed between 1872 and 1885, led by John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art together with seven of his Indian students, who together produced roughly three hundred paintings over more than a decade of seasonal work at the site. Some of Griffiths' copies were also later damaged, though not as completely as Gill's. The episode as a whole left behind a curious secondary legacy: a documentary record of how the paintings appeared in the nineteenth century, itself now a historically valuable and partially damaged archive, standing alongside the original site, which, protected today as a UNESCO World Heritage property, has fared better than either of the two copying efforts made in its name.