The Ajanta Caves, Part 1

That feeling that you get when you are standing on the second floor of an ornate monastery carved out of a cave, looking between the columns of the porch at a statue of a woman, half completed and a quarter eroded emerging out of the cliff face and then a leaf, bright, piercing yellow against the hazy background of green trees and blue sky and smog, falls upwards and out of sight. Buoyed by the thermals, the hot-air convection currents that so frequently occur near cliffs above water, your rational mind says. Like in Artemis Fowl, your rational mind says. But that is silly, and that is not here. Here it is just a yellow leaf falling upwards past the disbelieving face of the half-hewn woman, 1500 years old.

…

So its been a little while, hasn't it. I'm not as frequent as I once was. I suspected this would happen. It is not that new events are happening with less frequency, although perhaps they are, perhaps I am somewhat settled in to living in India. But then there was finals week, and that was chaotic and busy and I did a lot of work and it wasn't very good work; this was somewhat disappointing.

My finals week just happened because now I am no longer attending classes. Now I am on my Independent Study Project, or ISP. Last week they set us free, gave us 42,000 Rs. or about $630 in cash, and pushed us out into independence. More or less.

Most of us stayed around Delhi for a while first, as the program center is still offering free lunches, and free food is always good. Also, most of us have a fair amount of reading to do, and Delhi is a pretty ideal place for that. And hanging out with eachother is also nice, before we are all on our own.

As of now I think everyone is off. Margaux is staying behind in Delhi, researching what it is like to be out in India, interviewing people and such. Rachel is down in Tamil Nadu, or perhaps Keralla, or somewhere, studying the art of Raja Ravi Varma, a turn of the 20th century artist whose oleographs of deities are ubiquitous in India. There is a lot of pretty interesting angles that she was considering, and I don't know which one she is looking at. Ally is also down in Tamil Nadu, staying in Chennai and walking on the beach and studying devidasi, or temple dancers and their impact on modern Indian dance and some associated ethical issues. Kendall is in Goa, studying Goanese cuisine and eating I can only assume extremely well, and also hanging out on the beaches. Lindsey was in Goa for a wedding but I think now she is back in Delhi and will shortly be off to Gujarat to go to another wedding (I don't know what question she is trying to answer, but I know she is going to a lot of weddings). Eny is in the forest in Gujarat, studying the Siddhis. She might interact with some tigers as well. Simona is studying city planning in Jaipur. And Ilan and I are at the caves of Ajanta; he is studying the Archæological Survey of India and how it decides to allocate resources and how it conserves the myriad monuments and sites across India that are of historical import (and also how it worked under British rule versus self rule).

And that leaves me, who I guess I'll somewhat selfishly give the most detail about. That is not to say that mine is the most interesting project: on the contrary, I'm probably more interested to see what happens with other peoples' projects. Mine though is studying the caves of Ajanta and their impact on modern Indian art and modern Indian Artistic Identity. The problem is, I don't really know what any of those words mean. Hopefully I'll figure it out. Meanwhile, I can look at some ancient art work that is quite pretty, and some modern artwork that is quite pretty, and look back and forth between them and see what is happening there.

…

The Ajanta caves are, first and foremost, spectacular. Located in a cliff face over a bend in the river, there are about 30 caves that have been carved out as Buddhist religious sites, either simple temples or, quite frequently, monasteries. The first work done on them was probably in the 2nd or 1st century BCE, and then the last construction done was probably around the 5th century CE. But calling them caves is a rather large understatement. You don't expect caves to be multi-storied buildings with many rooms with beautifully columned exteriors. And to be fair, mostly they are just a single story, but…

They tend to be large halls with flat roofs and floors with columns lining the sides, separating out the middle floor section from a kind of exterior hallway, frequently with small rooms where monks could live carved into the walls, and then one central Buddha figure per cave. Each cave is either filled with paintings, statues, or is incomplete with lava-flow-turned-rocks partially carved out. The paintings, although kind of worn and hard to make out (as happens when exposed to the elements for 1500 years) are frequently quite beautiful: rich, earthy tones of red and yellow and brown and blue, a rhythmically wavy composition and excellent portrayals of faces and emotions. Perspective is used but also frequently ignored as the paintings abstract away the necessity of realism. There is no awkwardity, as if the artists just didn't know how to paint the human form naturally, but rather deliberate abstraction that ends up conveying the humanity of the figures excellently. The sculptures are similar in nature, although my ability to speak about sculpture is less than my already limited capacity of discussion of paintings. The ceilings and columns are decorated with more geometric and floral designs, with light lines and elegant form and mandalas everywhere.

And then: standing in the doorway of any of the caves,you can look outside at the beautiful natural formation of the location, the U-bend in the river with the tall and steep hill across the way,and see many of the other caves in the distance, columns and statues carved into the rock.

I am glad that I came here.

…

We flew into Aurangabad on Tuesday night. I had read on the Internet that it was “easy” to catch a bus to Fardapur, the closest tiny town to the caves. I also thought it was only a half an hour bus ride. It turns out that: a) it is a 2 and a half hour bus ride and b) there probably weren't any after 6, and we got in at 8:30. We figured these facts out, of course, after we landed. Ilan just suggested that it would be easy and obvious to find our way, and I was kind of thinking the same thing, and everyone else seemed to fair fine. But simply leaving the airport was hard! There were two taxis, and we somehow ended up last in line for them.

We pretty quickly gave up on the whole bus thing that evening, used my handy internet stick + my handy power pack to create an insta-wifi hotspot and found a suuper cheap hotel nearby. It cost 300 Rs. to get there (an outrageously high taxi price), but it ended up costing only 700 Rs. for the two of us to stay the night. And it had wifi, and TV! The walls were fluorescent purple, fluorescent orange, and fluorescent green. Amazing. We used an additional 250 Rs. to pay for breakfast, which they brought directly to the room; I can't remember the last time I had breakfast in bed. And, yes, it did turn out to be just a bad 2 oz. instant coffee, a fried egg and 6 pieces of bread, but you know: that's fine.

In the morning, we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to “the bus stop,” where there was something like 12 buses and no one recognized (or could understand?) what we were saying when we said Fardapur and none of the buses had any sort of labels or any instructions as to how to pay. Ilan started talking to some locals in Hinglish: they told us to get on this one bus and we were the only ones on the bus and no one asked for money yet and I was somewhat convinced that we'd just wind up in the completely incorrect part of India or maybe Sri Lanka or something. But we didn't! Someone came along and we said Fardapur and he actually understood us and charged us some money and gave us a ticket with the word Fardapur written in devanagri. The bus filled up and was the loudest, clankiest bus I've ever been on.

…

Fardapur is a tiny town, full of cotton farms and goats. Yesterday, as we were walking down the road, we passed two goats, hung up by the side of the road and in the act of being skinned. They were dead, to clarify. This morning, I passed two goats, alive this time, lying between two men on a motorcycle. They seemed fine with the situation. Everyone has been extremely nice, and although they are kind of trying to sell us things, they are also mostly just being generous and kind. We met a guy named Ali who offered to take us up to a lookout in the morning during sunrise, and who gave me chai and a ride on his motorcycle. At the shop down the street where we buy our water (the concierge did not understand me when I repAeated requests slowly for a bottle of water in Hindi and in English), a small child stared at me. I said “Hello” and then he responded “Hello;” I said “How are you?” and he said “How are you?” and I said “I am good” and he said “I am good.” It was a good conversation, but I couldn't tell whether he was just skilled at echolalia. He proceeded to say something in Hindi and everyone else laughed.

…

The air isn't clean per se. The visibility is actually pretty low due to all the smog, and it does get kind of poisonous in the evenings. But it has been clean enough that I have been able to go for a few runs. No one else seems to understand that concept, and I have been offered a few rides by concerned passers-by. And then also now my legs are quite upset at me. But it has been nice, to move around a bit. I ran up a trail by a stream for a sec, and over a bridge while the sunset cast red lights over the clouds over the mountains in the reflection in the stream by the almost neon green moss, grass and shrubbery.

And the food is cheap and the room is cheap and also florescently colored, although I don't have wifi. I am slightly at a loss about how my paper will proceed, but I have little doubts that this will be assuaged.