A new book captures the many histories of Ellora’s art

Over a thousand years ago, one of the largest com plexes of rock-cut caves in the world were carved in the village of Elapura in Maharashtra. Between 600 CE and 1000 CE, highly skilled guilds of sculptors, painters and architects together created Buddhist, Hindu and Jain imagery in these rock-cut temples, including the Kailash in Cave 16, which is the largest monolithic rock excavation in the world dedicated to Shiva. Carved into the Charanandri Hills, Ellora, featuring 34 main caves and spread across 2km, has been studied by scholars from around the world. There has been debate about the overlapping styles of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave temples, making it difficult to agree upon a specific chronology of their creation.

A new book, Ellora: A Cross-Fertilization of Style in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain Cave Temples (Mapin Publishing), goes beyond just documentation and chrono logical arrangement of the Unesco World Heritage Site. Rather, it seeks to capture the essence of the complex by investigating the three groups of rock-cut temples—Buddhist (Caves 1-12), Hindu (Caves 13-29) and Jain (Caves 30-34)— through their iconography, patronage, stylistic influences, economics of monastery life, cultural exchange, and the pro cess of art production.

“When I began to go through my doctoral thesis anew, it was clear that I could not do justice to this site alone,” writes Deepanjana Klein, art historian, special advisor to the chairperson, and director of acquisitions and development, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, in her preface. So, she began to assemble a group of scholars “who share the same passion, dedication and scholarship for the site.” She has co-edited the book with her husband, Arno Klein, director of innovative technologies at the Child Mind Institute in New York. Ellora doesn’t just feature photographic documentation and ground plans, but also rare 19th-century etchings of the caves, including hand-coloured aquatints by Thomas Daniell, watercolours by M.F. Pithawalla, and James Burgess’s plans for the Archaeological Survey of India. The book has essays by academics such as Naman Ahuja, Vidya Dehejia, Nicolas Morrissey and Lisa N. Owen.

Deepanjana’s tryst with Ellora started in 1993 after she graduated from Santiniketan, West Bengal. She was exposed to the site by Prof. Walter Spink, a renowned art historian whose main area of research was the Buddhist caves of Ajanta and Ellora. This remains a subject closest to her heart—so much so that Deepanjana named her daughter Ellora. The couple and their child would visit the site year after year, photographing it from every vantage point.

“As a young art historian, I was interested in the dialogue between architecture and sculpture, more so in cave temples, where you have to design everything ahead of time and there is no room for error,” Deepanjana tells Lounge. Say, an artist was sculpting a temple top down and made a mistake, they would have had to abandon the spot. In some areas, the rock might have been unstable, which is why some caves are abandoned. “There are so many uncertainties that a sculptor and an architect might have faced in a project such as this one. It’s fascinating and quite mind boggling,” she adds.

The Kleins, for nearly a decade, have been working on an interactive website on Ellora. Together with an assistant, they have geolocated more than 7,000 anno tated images of sculptures, paintings and architectural details on old floor plans. The website (elloracaves.org) allows visitors to navigate the temples by moving the cursor over the floor plans. “When I finished my PhD, I was lucky enough to have received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support my documentation of the Ellora caves. We felt that we had been supported through this journey so generously that we needed to give something back to a community of art historians, students and scholars. So, Arno came up with the idea of the website,” says Deepanjana.

The idea is that anyone anywhere in the world should be able to see where sculptures stand in the site, and what their relationship with the space is like. Deepanjana hopes to make this an open-source site on Ellora so that scholars can keep adding information and keep the knowledge growing. The book then is an organic extension of the web site project.

Ellora is interesting for the context that it offers—for instance, where does the cave complex stand in relation to other rock-cut architecture in India from the same period? Was there a cross-fertilisation of styles and ideas, say between the Bhokardan Tukai Buddhist caves in Jalna district in Maharashtra and Ellora. There are further questions around the role that patronage played in bringing about these stylistic affiliations and the movement of artist guilds from site to site. In the chapter, Power, Prestige and the Greatest Myths at Ellora, Deepanjana cites the work of archaeologist K.V. Soundara rajan regarding Cave 15, a Buddhist cave converted for Hindu use under Rashtrak uta patronage (757-772CE). He argues that artisans from Vijayawada worked at Bhokardan for the Rashtrakutas in the late 7th or 8th century. “As evidence, the Seshashayi Vishnu image from Cave 15 is very similar to the one at Bhokardan and may be compared to the very badly damaged one at Pataleshwar in Pune. The same sculptors from the Andhra region may have trav elled to Bhokardan and then Ellora. These sculptors might have reached Ellora in the 7th century and were immediately followed by the Pattadakal masters from the Chalukyan sites in Karnataka,” she writes.

Looking at Cave 15, for instance, it seems as if these groups worked together. According to Deepanjana, it is important to understand that there was a vibrant ecosystem for artists and sculptors. Most of them were affiliated to guilds, which were not necessarily tied to a religion. Rather, their work was driven by patronage. She points the readers towards stylistic affiliations between Elephanta and the Dhumar Lena cave (Cave 29) at Ellora, which indicates that the two might have been created by the same guild during the reign of the Kalachuris (575-608 CE).

Cave 29 is one of the earliest Hindu caves at the site. This was built under the Kalachuris, who were in power then and belonged to one of the oldest Shaivite sects and worshipped Lakulisha. And then came the Rashtrakutas, who were also interested in Shaivism and ended up commissioning the iconic Kailash in Cave 16. “Around the time that Kalachuris’ power was waning, they were hurriedly trying to finish Cave 29. Vidya Dehejia, in her essay, asks what is a complete cave. She explains that for the Kalachuris, completion meant finishing the main shrine,” explains Deepanjana. So, even though Cave 29 is not fully complete, the shrine is beautifully finished. In the rest of the caves, some of the panels are not well-carved, some are incomplete. That is because the Kalachuris had to give up on the work due to lack of funding and waning of power. “The Rashtrakutas were not interested in Cave 29, they wanted to leave their own signature on the site. So, they ended up building the Kailash,” she adds.

In another insightful essay, The Buddhist Cult of Images and the Business of Buddhist Monasticism, Nicolas Morrissey questions the concept of “intrusive images,” traditionally considered as images that “did not conform to—or even violated or disrupted—a preor dained decorative plan for a given cave…” For example, along the interior of Cave 2 there are dozens of sculpted image panels along the aisle walls and window recesses, which seem not to adhere to an orderly plan. “Nicolas offers a very interesting way of looking at the economics of monastic life. How do the monks maintain these beauti fully embellished caves that they live in? They ask donors to pay for an image, say of a standing or a seated Buddha. The images of the donors too make an appearance at the bottom. So, the intrusive images actually speak of the entire business of maintaining the site and keeping the monastery alive,” says Deepanjana.

In his essay, Naman Ahuja looks at how architecture, sculpture and literature inspired one another. The guilds referred to the scriptures for guidance on depic tions of myths and legends, and yet some of the artists ended up taking liberties. Cave 21, for instance, is a Shaivite site. However, the overall composition reveals that the artists dedicated the entire cave to Shakti, be it the Lajja Gauri in the front courtyard carved at the base of Nandi, a panel on Parvati’s penance, or the scenes featuring the Saptamatrikas. In Cave 14 too, you see two images of devi as Simhavahini and Mahishasura Mar dini. At the southern end of the circum ambulatory path, there is an iconic panel of the Saptamatrika as well. These artistic liberties are fascinating.

The archival material from the 19th century forms a conduit between the ancient and the modern. It offers a glimpse of what the site might have looked like 100-200 years ago. There is, of course, the debate around the colonial gaze of artists such as Daniells, and how it needs to be redefined. “Of course we need to ask questions on how we were being represented at that time—as romantic or oriental, or something else? But, the watercolours and aquatints allow us to imagine the caves a century ago, and how they evolved,” says Deepanjana. In Cave 10, you can see that the seated Buddha was fully stuccoed and painted. However, by the time the photographer captured the image, only the stuccoed eyes had survived. “The archival material allows you to reconstruct at least in your mind what the site may have looked like,” she says.