India Discovered (27 page)

Ralph:
The fewer theories you form, the fewer blunders and dreams you will make.

Gresley:
We must form theories – we cannot remain awake and not do so.

Ralph’s pet theory was that the Ajanta cave temples, like those of Elephanta, Kanheri and Ellora, were the work of ancient
Egyptian conquerors. Whether those Egyptians were supposed to have brought Buddhism with them or to have adopted it on arrival he did not say. But both men were sure that the caves and the paintings were Buddhist. A Dr James Bird, who joined them on site, disagreed. He thought they were Jain and he had brought a learned
pandit
along to read the inscriptions and thus prove his point. He was also
preparing an account of the place for the Royal Asiatic Society and intended taking away some of the paintings by prising them from the walls.

Ralph was full of scorn. The inscriptions were in a variation of the still undeciphered Ashoka script; they duly baffled the
pandit.
Moreover there was nothing to suggest that the caves were Jain. And as for removing the paintings, it was quite impossible
– except as dust. Nevertheless Dr Bird tried; and ‘not withstanding protestations about defacing monuments, this visitor contrived to peel off four painted figures from the zodiac or shield’.

Subsequent visitors followed this sad precedent; at one time there was even a resident caretaker who, for a small consideration, presented all-comers with a souvenir fragment. James Fergusson, who visited
Ajanta about 1839, was duly scandalized, and launched the first of many attempts to save the frescoes. To him we owe the now accepted designation of the caves – ‘I numbered them like houses in a street’ – and the first clear statement of their origin — Buddhist and dating from about 200
BC
to
AD
650. The paintings were mostly from the Gupta period (fifth, sixth and seventh centuries
AD
) but some
as early as the first century
BC
. Historically they were as important for the understanding of ancient India as the Bharhut and Sanchi reliefs. But they were infinitely more vulnerable and fragile. If anything was to be saved they must quickly be copied and brought to the attention of art historians.

On Fergusson’s recommendation, Major Robert Gill arrived at Ajanta in 1844 and commenced a painstaking
record of all the paintings. Twenty-seven years later he was still engaged on the job. In the story of British attempts to record India’s past Gill’s dedication is unrivalled; sadly, though, it was futile. His oil paintings of the Ajanta murals went on display at the Crystal Palace, London, along with the first Gandhara sculptures to reach England. In December 1866 all were destroyed by
fire; the canvases had not even been photographed. With quite staggering resilience, Gill returned to Ajanta to begin his life’s work again; but he died, on site, a year later.

His place was taken, in 1872, by John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art, and the work of copying continued for a further thirteen years. Again the results were sent to London. They went on display in the Victoria and
Albert Museum and again they were destroyed by fire. But this time photographs had been taken. In 1897, nearly fifty years after their discovery, the Ajanta paintings were at last published and the art world could begin to form some opinion of them.

Whether a speedier appreciation of their aesthetic worth would have done much to ensure their preservation is highly doubtful. It is clear that they
were already tragically mutilated in the 1820s, liable to crumble at the slightest touch. No doubt they continued to deteriorate; though they might have been better protected from vandals, there was no known method of restoring them. Indeed, any attempt at preservation was liable to be positively damaging. With the idea of resisting the monsoon damp, as well as to bring out their colours, Gill
had administered a thick coat of varnish. This tended to blur the original brushwork; and when applied to subjects already encrusted with dirt and smoke, produced just a dingy splodge. In 1871 Clements Markham thought he was writing their obituary: Gill’s varnish had ‘injured them irremediably and they are now rapidly fading away’.

Although Griffith’s work proved that this was not yet the case,
another complication surfaced when John Marshall proposed an attempt at their restoration. Ajanta was just inside Hyderabad territory. In the native states, even Curzon’s new Archaeological Department had to move with caution, and it was in fact Hyderabad’s own Archaeological Department, founded in 1914, which eventually took the frescoes in hand. Thirty miles of road were built up to the gorge
and, enticed by the Nizam’s liberality, two Italian specialists, Professor Cecconi and Count Orsini, worked at Ajanta from 1920 to 1922. Analyses were made of the pigments and painting process which, incidentally, revealed that they were not, properly speaking, frescoes. (The plaster was not painted while wet, but moistened during the painting.) After many experiments the old varnish, dirt and smoke
were removed with alcohol, turpentine and ammonia. Beeswax in turpentine was then used as a fixative, and cement and shellac mixtures used to secure the old plaster. The results were a revelation: a volume of photographs of the restored paintings prompted the
Burlington Magazine
to declare them ‘perhaps the greatest artistic wonder of Asia’. Suddenly, if belatedly, Ajanta art had achieved world
recognition. In 1923 the great ballerina Pavlova performed an ‘Ajanta Ballet’ at London’s Covent Garden, with choreography based on the gestures and poses of the cave paintings. It was a fitting tribute, because a training in music and dance had been a prerequisite for the original artists. To coincide with the ballet, the
Illustrated London News
published some photographs of the paintings with
a long introduction by Sir John Marshall. The Ajanta frescoes were, he declared, ‘one of the Wonders of the East’.

Few things are more impressive than one of these halls at Ajanta seen towards the close of a winter’s afternoon. All day long it has lain in shadow, but about four o’clock the sun comes round the shoulder of the hill opposite, and slowly the figures emerge from the gloom, one by one taking definition of form and feature and kindling colour after colour under the touch of the warm and glowing sunlight. Unlike the frescoes in the Sistine chapel, the Ajanta paintings are not the work of a single artist, nor are they homogeneous in design. They have been executed by many hands and at different times — the gifts of donors who gave according to their means&. Yet in spite of their diversity of size and their varying age and excellence, there is remarkable unity in their general effect; for all the artists of Ajanta followed the same traditional methods in their drawing, and observed the same restraint and reticence in their colouring and tones&. In these paintings there was no affectation, no striving after meretricious effects. Centuries of experience had taught the artists that in line and silhouette lay the true secret of mural painting, and they brought their drawing to a pitch of excellence that has seldom been equalled.

But the sudden popularity of Ajanta art was not simply the result of new restoration techniques and of publicity. Something much more fundamental had happened: during the first decade of the twentieth century, Indian art as a whole had at
last achieved recognition. The role of the outspoken art master, Ernest Havell, in the aesthetic evaluation of Indian sculpture has already been mentioned; and it was Havell who also inspired and initiated the appreciation of Indian painting.

But first he had virtually to resurrect the subject. Back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Indian painting meant miniatures, brightly coloured,
highly stylized and delicately executed illustrations of court life, birds and animals, hunting scenes and flowers. It was particularly associated with the Moghul emperors and was clearly an off-shoot of the Persian miniature school. Many of the artists had been Persians attracted to India by Moghul patronage and, though the techniques had since been adopted by Indians, the inspiration was
still Persian and Islamic. By the time the British arrived in upper India, Moghul patronage was in decline and with it Moghul art. The newcomers, schooled on Gainsborough and Constable, could see no great virtue in what appeared to be an obsession with detail and miniaturization. Thomas Twining much admired Moghul architecture, but found little to praise in Moghul painting.

The merit of their drawing is almost confined to a very accurate imitation of flowers and birds. I never saw a tolerable landscape or portrait of their execution. They are very unsuccessful in the art of shading and seem to have very little knowledge of the rules of perspective.

A contemporary of Twining’s, George Forster, also mentioned their ignorance of ‘the rules of proportion and perspective’: ‘they are
just imitators and correct workmen & they possess merely the glimmerings of genius’. But if this laborious attention to detail and considerable imitative skill could hardly be rated as fine art, it had its uses: in the early 1800s many Indian artists were employed by British patrons to produce souvenir portfolios of buildings, animals, domestic servants and so forth.

Not surprisingly, scholars
like Cunningham and Fergusson totally ignored what appeared to them to be purely an applied art. Introduced by one set of outsiders, and now adapted to the requirements of another, it was of little antiquarian interest; Indian painting belonged with enamel work and batik in the arts and crafts section. Even the discovery of the Ajanta murals and similar cave paintings at Bagh (Madhya Pradesh) did
not prompt a drastic rethinking. For one thing there appeared to be no possible connection between a Buddhist school of mural painting which died out in western India in the seventh century and an Islamic school of miniature painting which appeared in north India in the sixteenth century. The chasm between the two appeared unbridgeable, and Ajanta could only be explained as some freakish anomaly.
To critics who ignored or disputed that its paintings spanned some 700 years, the obvious explanation was that Ajanta was the work of foreigners. The refinement of technique, the impeccable draughtsmanship and the exquisite modelling could only be the product of centuries of artistic development. Since there was no evidence of any such tradition in India, one must look abroad.

Whoever seriously undertakes the critical study of the paintings of Ajanta and Bagh [wrote Vincent Smith in 1889] will find, I have no doubt, that the artists drew their inspiration from the West, and I think that he will also find that their style is a local development of the cosmopolitan art of the contemporary Roman empire.

If there was Indo-Greek and Indo-Roman sculpture in Gandhara, why not Indo-Roman
painting at Ajanta? One of the paintings apparently showed the reception by an Indian sovereign of envoys from Persia. This ‘proves, or goes a long way towards proving, that the Ajanta school of pictorial art was derived directly from Persia and ultimately from Greece’.

It was the same old story; and as usual it stimulated Ernest Havell to a vigorous protest. He showed that there was plenty of
literary evidence for the existence of an ancient Indian school of painting and argued, most plausibly, that in a country with a climate like India’s it was not surprising that so few actual examples survived. Smith’s suggestion, that the painting of a Persian envoy demonstrated that Persian influence was paramount, was clearly rubbish. And though north Indian Buddhism was undoubtedly somewhat cosmopolitan,
the title of the Ajanta paintings to be considered Indian was ‘as valid as that of the schools of Athens to be called Greek, those of Italy to be called Italian and perhaps stronger than that of the schools of Oxford to be considered English’.

Never one to be discouraged by a dearth of evidence, Havell sidestepped the medieval chasm in Indian painting by claiming, ingeniously and correctly, that
when Buddhism spread to Central Asia and thence to China, it took the ideals and techniques of Ajanta with it. Less plausibly, he maintained that the Mongols borrowed these traditions of Indian art from the Chinese; the Moghuls, or Mongols, in India were thus repaying their ancestors’ debt to Indian culture. In fact, Moghul painting had undergone the same process as Moghul architecture. Initially
encumbered with foreign – in this case Persian – ideals, it had been quickly emancipated from the sober formality of the Persians and reanimated by the spirit of Indian art.

Havell considered all Indian miniatures as ‘Moghul’, and knew of no parallel but distinct Hindu or Rajput school. Indeed, his brand of criticism had little time for schools or styles of any kind. Unlike Fergusson, disserting
India’s architecture into ‘water-tight compartments’, Havell liked to emphasize not the differences but the shared characteristics. Instead of discussing a school of painting or sculpture, he discussed individual works of art. And considering how few were available to him, his selection shows outstanding discernment: most of his examples are still regarded as classics. In the case of painting,
whether it was an Ajanta fresco or a Moghul miniature, he concentrated on what was common to both and therefore distinctively Indian – the daring but faultless use of colour, the simple precision of line, the mastery of expressive gesture and pose, the ability to evoke mood and the deep understanding of nature. Of course, Moghul art was more secular and naturalistic than anything in ancient India.
But it too, according to Havell, was conceptual in that no subject was drawn from life. Take the famous picture of a turkey cock commissioned by Jehangir. The artist would of course have studied the turkey and frequently referred to it. But the actual painting would have been the subject ‘recollected in tranquillity’; hence the result, which says a lot more about a turkey cock, from the precise
markings of the feathers to the absurd swagger, than could any accurate painting from life. It is a turkey as one imagines a turkey; but it could never win a poultry club prize.