Ajanta Caves Quotes

Buddhism suddenly deteriorated in India sometime after the fourth century of the Christian era. It has been rightly said that Hinduism stifled it in its friendly embrace. Like Christianity and Judaism in Judea and Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism had to be exiled from India for it to become a world religion. It was necessary for India to turn to a more primitive folk religion. Hinduism perfunctorily retained the name Buddha in a far corner of its pantheon, where he was preserved as the ninth of the ten avatars of Vishnu. Vishnu is believed to assume ten transfigurations: Matsya, the fish; Kurma, the land tortoise; Varha, the boar; Narasimha, the man-lion; Vamana, the dwarf; Parashurama; Rama; Krishna; the Buddha; and the Kalki. According to the Brahmans, Vishnu, assuming the form of Buddha, purposely introduced a heretical religion so that believers would be led astray, thus presenting the opportunity for the Brahmans to lead them back to their true religion -- Hinduism. Thus, along with the decline of Buddhism the cave temples at Ajanta in western India fell into ruin and became known to the world only twelve centuries later, in 1819, when a British Army corps chanced upon them.

Elephanta caves, Mumbai-- I entered a world made of shadows and sudden brightness. The play of the light, the vastness of the space and its irregular form, the figures carved on the walls: all of it gave the place a sacred character, sacred in the deepest meaning of the word. In the shadows were the powerful reliefs and statues, many of them mutilated by the fanaticism of the Portuguese and the Muslims, but all of them majestic, solid, made of a solar material. Corporeal beauty, turned into living stone. Divinities of the earth, sexual incarnations of the most abstract thought, gods that were simultaneously intellectual and carnal, terrible and peaceful. ............................................................................ Gothic architecture is the music turned to stone; one could say that Hindu architecture is sculpted dance. The Absolute, the principle in whose matrix all contradictions dissolve (Brahma), is “neither this nor this nor this.” It is the way in which the great temples at Ellora, Ajanta, Karli, and other sites were built, carved out of mountains. In Islamic architecture, nothing is sculptural—exactly the opposite of the Hindu. The Red Fort, on the bank of the wide Jamuna River, is as powerful as a fort and as graceful as a palace. It is difficult to think of another tower that combines the height, solidity, and slender elegance of the Qutab Minar. The reddish stone, contrasting with the transparency of the air and the blue of the sky, gives the monument a vertical dynamism, like a huge rocket aimed at the stars. The mausoleum is like a poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers: strict meters that cross and recross in angles that are obvious but no less surprising rhymes. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres, and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into a collection of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air. There is nothing terrifying in these tombs: they give the sensation of infinity and pacify the soul. The simplicity and harmony of their forms satisfy one of the most profound necessities of the spirit: the longing for order, the love of proportion. At the same time they arouse our fantasies. These monuments and gardens incite us to dream and to fly. They are magic carpets. Compare Ellora with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two different visions of the world.

He'd hooked me, I am not a man who goes gaga upon touching a rare first edition of Lady Chumley's collected couplets, say, but I was interested. As I took the manuscript from him, he was saying, “Oddly enough, perhaps my greatest interest is the art and literature of India. I have, myself, visited the overpowering caves at Ellora, Ajanta, and Elephanta.” I examined the manuscript with growing interest.

Gao Jianfu came to India at a juncture when many Indian nationalist leaders and personalities like Gandhi and Tagore were sympathetic to China under the notorious Japanese aggression. Gao was an ardent reader of Rabindranath’s poetry. However, it is hard to trace, from the available data, the extent of his exposure to contemporary art in Bengal since he did not visit Santiniketan and look up its artistic activities. But many of his drawings and sketches bore evidence of some interactions. It is interesting that while the artists of Bengal were eager to assimilate certain elements of Japanese and Chinese art, a celebrated Chinese artist and intellectual visited Bengal almost in the same trajectory, and we do not have enough record of this event. Gao Jianfu, during his long trip to India, also visited the Ajanta caves and made a large number of copies of the Ajanta murals. From these copies, he did a great many sketches and drawings as if he were putting together a visual travelogue interspersed with narratives and footnotes. Fascinatingly, some of his drawings of ruined stupas and Buddhist sites that he visited in India were evidence of their impact on him, working behind his growing inclination to Buddhism and spirituality during the later phase of his life.

the Ajanta Caves,