Cut into the curved basalt wall of a horseshoe-shaped gorge of the Waghur River in Maharashtra, India, the Ajanta Caves are 30 rock-cut Buddhist monuments made in two separate bursts of work: an early phase in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, and a late phase in the 5th century CE under the Vakataka king Harishena. They include worship halls (chaityas) and monasteries (viharas), and their wall paintings, led by the bodhisattva Padmapani in Cave 1 and long cycles of Jataka tales, form the largest surviving body of ancient Indian wall painting. The site lies about 104 km from Aurangabad and 59 km from Jalgaon; it was abandoned, overgrown and then shown to a British officer, John Smith, during a tiger hunt in 1819, and it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
A Horseshoe Bend in the Waghur Gorge
The setting explains much of Ajanta. The Waghur winds through the Deccan Plateau in a tight U-shaped loop, and the caves are cut into the rocky northern wall of that loop, along a cliff face about 75 m high. When the river runs high after the monsoon, a chain of waterfalls in the gorge can be heard from outside the caves. Textual records suggest the monks used the caves as a monsoon retreat, and that merchants and pilgrims on the trade routes across western India rested here too.
The rock is flood basalt of the Deccan Traps, laid down by successive volcanic eruptions at the end of the Cretaceous period. It lies in horizontal layers of uneven quality, and that unevenness shaped the work. Carvers began each cave with a narrow tunnel at roof level and widened it downward and outward, which is clear in unfinished caves such as 21 to 24 and the abandoned Cave 28. Where a weak layer appeared, plans changed; Cave 4 lost part of its ceiling in a collapse, probably in the 6th century, and the portico of Cave 1 has also fallen.
The cave numbers start with Cave 1 at the eastern end of the curve and describe position along the cliff, not age. Later surveys identified 36 foundations in all, and caves found after the original numbering got letters, such as 15A between 15 and 16. A grand gateway with elephants and a naga (snake deity) was carved at the apex of the horseshoe between Caves 15 and 16, facing anyone who approached from the river.
Two Phases of Carving: Satavahana Caves and Harishena’s Vakataka Burst
The first phase produced only a handful of caves: 9, 10, 12, 13 and 15A. Walter Spink, the leading specialist on Ajanta, dates them to roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE, under the patronage of the Satavahana dynasty that ruled the region; other scholars push them earlier. Cave 10 carries a Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script dated by its letter forms to around the 2nd century BCE, the oldest at the site. Cave 30, a tiny monastery of three cells found only in 1956 when a landslide was cleared near the stream bed, may be older still. These early caves were funded piece by piece: inscriptions in Cave 10 record individual donors giving parts of a single hall, which points to a community effort rather than one royal patron. They contain no figurative sculpture; the stupa is the focus.
Then the gorge went quiet for centuries, though not empty. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian recorded Buddhist visits around 400 CE. The second phase began in the 5th century and produced all the other caves: 1 to 8, 11 and 14 to 29. When and how fast it happened is the main scholarly argument about Ajanta. Spink holds that almost all of it took place in about 20 years, from 460 to 480 CE, under Harishena of the Vakataka dynasty, with work stopping soon after the king’s death. Karl Khandalavala, Hans Bakker and others argue for a longer span reaching into the 6th century, and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which manages the site, places the peak between the mid-5th and mid-6th centuries. Harishena’s own reign dates differ between sources.
The later caves were each paid for as a whole by one patron. Varahadeva, Harishena’s minister, sponsored Cave 16; a local king, Upendragupta, recorded in Cave 17 that he had “expended abundant wealth” on it and funded at least five caves in all; Cave 26 was the gift of a monk named Buddhabhadra and a minister of the Asmaka king. Spink reads the end of the work in political events: the Asmakas rebelled against Harishena’s son, the Vakataka line collapsed, and big projects stopped. In the years that followed, lesser donors and monks crammed some 200 small sculpted “intrusions” and many painted ones into any free space, probably more than 300 in Cave 10 alone. The last dated trace is a Rashtrakuta inscription beside Cave 26 from the late 7th or early 8th century.
Chaitya Halls Versus Viharas at Ajanta
Ajanta’s caves come in two types. A chaitya-griha, literally “house of the stupa”, is a long apsidal hall: a central nave flanked by rows of pillars, with a stupa near the far end and space to walk around it in the ritual circuit called pradakshina. Only four are complete. Caves 9 and 10 come from the early phase; Cave 10 is 30.5 m long with 39 octagonal pillars, and both once had wooden ribs under their vaults that have since perished. Caves 19 and 26 come from the late phase, with the timber ribs now copied in stone and a large carved Buddha placed in front of the stupa, standing in Cave 19 and seated in Cave 26. Cave 29, a late chaitya, was left very incomplete.
Every other cave is a vihara, a monastery. The basic plan is a square hall framed by pillars, with small cells for monks cut into the side and back walls. Early viharas such as Cave 12 have no shrine; in the late phase a shrine room with a large Buddha was added at the back, a change that marks the shift toward Mahayana devotion, and Spink shows that several caves were re-planned mid-excavation to fit one in. The late viharas are big. Cave 4 measures about 35 by 28 m, nearly 970 m², the largest at the site. Cave 17’s hall is a square of about 380 m² on 20 pillars, and Cave 6 is two monasteries stacked one above the other and joined by internal stairs. The carvers sometimes overreached: in Cave 17 they took out so much rock that the walls splay outward toward the back.
Padmapani, Vajrapani and the Jataka Murals
The murals are painted in “dry fresco”: pigment was applied on top of a dry plaster surface rather than into wet plaster. Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 hold the largest surviving group of ancient Indian wall paintings, and the compositions spread outward from a central figure rather than running in neat horizontal bands.
The two most celebrated figures are the over-life-size bodhisattvas Padmapani, holding a lotus, and Vajrapani, painted on either side of the shrine entrance in Cave 1. Spink believes Harishena himself paid for Cave 1, and its painted stories favour the Buddha’s previous lives as a king: the Sibi, Sankhapala, Mahajanaka and Champeyya Jatakas, alongside the Temptation of Mara. Cave 2 has a different emphasis, with many powerful women in its scenes, which has led some to suggest a woman paid for it; one panel shows a school where the front row listens and the back row misbehaves.
Cave 16 tells the life of the Buddha, including Sujata’s offering of food and his parents trying to talk him out of becoming a monk, and the Hasti Jataka, in which a bodhisattva elephant throws himself off a cliff so starving travellers can eat. Cave 17 has about thirty major murals, among them the Vessantara and Shaddanta Jatakas, a shipwreck, a princess at her make-up and Prince Simhala’s expedition to Sri Lanka. Some painting is older: according to Stella Kramrisch, the earliest layer in Cave 10, with the Saddanta and Shyama Jatakas, dates from about 100 BCE. In Cave 26 the late patrons put their effort into sculpture instead, believing stone would last longer than paint, and carved a reclining Buddha at the moment of his death (the Mahaparinirvana) on the aisle wall.
John Smith’s Tiger Hunt of 28 April 1819 and the Copies Lost to Fire
Ajanta was never entirely forgotten. The 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described it, medieval visitors left graffiti, and the 17th-century Ain-i-Akbari of Abu’l-Fazl mentions twenty-four rock-cut temples. But by the early 19th century the gorge was overgrown and known mainly to local people. On 28 April 1819 John Smith, an officer of the 28th Cavalry out hunting tigers, was led by a shepherd boy to the entrance of Cave 10. He brought villagers with axes, spears, torches and drums to clear the jungle, and then scratched his name and the date across a painted bodhisattva. He was standing on about five feet of rubble at the time, so the graffiti now sits well above an adult’s eye level.
The paintings began to fade once they were exposed, and copying them became a long and unlucky project. The Royal Asiatic Society hired Major Robert Gill, who painted at the site from 1844 to 1863; all but four of his 27 large copies burned in the Crystal Palace fire in London in 1866. From 1872 John Griffiths and his students spent thirteen years producing some 300 canvases, and more than a hundred of those were lost in another fire in 1885. The Victoria and Albert Museum still holds 166 paintings from the two sets. Between 1909 and 1911 Christiana Herringham worked with students from the Calcutta School of Art, among them the future modernist Nandalal Bose, on a third set.
In colonial times Ajanta lay in the princely state of Hyderabad. In the 1920s the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, built a road and brought in the Italian restorers Lorenzo Cecconi and Count Orsini to clean the murals. UNESCO listed the caves in 1983, and because crowds raise the humidity and threaten the paint, the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation announced in 2012 that full-size replicas of Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 would be built at the visitor centre. Most visitors pair Ajanta with the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist caves about 100 km away, described in our guide to the Ellora Caves, and the volcanic rock both sites are carved from is explained in our article on the Deccan Plateau.