Cliffside Caves

Leaving behind the roads of Rajasthan, we flew south to the city of Aurangabad, named after the last Mughal ruler Aurangazeb whose strict policy of religious intolerance led the empire into decline. Yet, long before the mongols came south, another dynasty ruled here. they were a powerful nation of traders who controlled commerce along the silk road as traders brought silk from China and spices from the south and east of Hindustan. Along this thriving trade route lived a series of monks, first Buddhists, then Hindus and even some Jains (a religion similar to Buddhism). These rulers held kingdoms along the border of the Deccan plateau, a large basalt formation that stretches across the southern half of India. Basalt is a particularly strong rock and the Deccan rises in a series of high flat steps marked by cliffs of sheer black rock frosted in jungle. The monks, seeking shelter in the cliffsides of the plateau, alms from the traders and patronage from the kings, began to build temples (chaityas) and monasteries (viharas) into the cliffs marking the edge of the plateau steps.

In the 1850s, a British army officer named John Smith was out tiger hunting and saw an animal disappear into the rock. Astonished he approached the rock wall and discovered the Ajanta caves which had been hidden for centuries and has thus survived Aurangazebs religious purge and countless other invasions and pier struggles in the region. what he discovered was extraordinary. There are sixteen caves at Ajanta carved down out of the basalt cliffs and they are lined with five hundred year old tempera paintings and crisscrossed with carvings telling the life of the lord Buddha. Monasteries carved into the rock. Contain dozens of cells where monks would spend a night on during their wanderings. Because Buddhism teaches the denial of all material comforts a monk was not allowed to keep a proper home but instead moved from cave to cave taking only his clothes and his begging bowls. Jain monks took this denial of the material a stepfather further and wandered naked. as we wandered through the caves it was hRd to remember that the entire structure true was carved from only one piece of rock, no stones, no inlaid slabs, no statuary. We will try to let these picture give the effect.

For all the simplicity of the monastic lifestyle the caves are richly decorated and ornately carved. The paintings are reminiscent of Italian frescoes because they use the same mineral paint colors but they were painted when Europe was in its dark ages, well before the Renaissance. Indeed, a look at any of the paintings reveals the use of perspective in composition long before any of Italy's masters employed the technique.

A sculptured wall of one of the Ajanta caves

A stupa inside the cave with walls carved to mimic wooden bracing and beams

Mom standing in the outer temple
of the Ellora Hindu complex

An elephant guarding the cave entrance

After visiting the caves at Ajanta and Ellora we drove back through the countryside to visit one more fort. The drive was beautiful. We passed a number of local people preparing for the festival of the elephant headed god Ganseha and at every farm house spotted a pair of bulls with brightly painted horns. Our guide explained that painting the bulls' horns was a painless way of branding them. Once a year the people celebrate and give thanks to the bulls and repaint the horns. This is the one day of rest from the fields the animals get all year.

Taking a statute of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha to the temple.

Young muslim boys on
Eid holiday filled the bus

A window into the labryinth

In addition to visiting the caves, we stopped to see the Ellora fort. After seeing so many castles we were a bit weary of another stone palace but the Ellora fort is unique. It has never been captured. It is a study in trickery and calculated violence. 
To begin with, the fort is hidden around a curve in the plain so that as an enemy approaches along the trade route they do not see it at first. Instead from the road they see a looming façade on a well elevated hill. From a distance it looks just like the Ellora fort. However, this is the decoy fort, a carved rock precipice intended to trick the enemy into marching miles in the wrong direction. The actual Ellora fort sits around another bend with its keep high on a rocky crag. The fort is guarded by an impressive wall. But it is not just the fortifcation but the layout of the palace that is so forboding. At every turn along the approach to the keep the architects made it far easier to head left. Taking a left leaning tack however leads to a serious of false doors and dead ends which heard the enemy into closed chambers or cliff drops that allow them to be picked off with arrows and hot oil.

The bridge over the moat

 If a valiant enemy were to make it past the first set of deceptions it would then be faced with a crocodile stocked moat and rickety leather bridge to cross, wide enough for only two men to pass abreast. Assuming the enemy could navigate the bridge it would be confronted by the pitch black, bat infested, tunnels of a labyrinth running hundreds of feet into the rock. In the dark echoing maze there are strategic branching tunnels that divide the enemy so that when half goes left the other half goes right and the enemy then doubles back through the maze, converges on itself in the dark and unwittingly attacks its own men.
 The small shafts of light that do penetrate the maze, tempt the confused and frightened soldier to slide through a tunnel that drops away to the moat where the crocodiles wait. We entered the labyrinth accompanied by a pack of screaming young boys and got a feel for what it would have been like to battle our way through.

Monkeys in the trees outside Ellora Fort

After touring the Ellora fort, we headed back into Aurangabad and had a delicious traditional Thali lunch and headed to catch the plane to Mumbai.

Standing for photos with packs of young boys on Eid holiday amazed to see a tourist in their midst