Episode 11 (India, Part 1 of 3)

Some visitors to India return home and say they loved it.  Others say they hated it.  Still others straddle the fence. That’s me.  I hate India for the way it treats lower castes, Muslims, widows, servants, and—not to be overlooked—animals, but I love India because it contains everything.  

I mean this in two ways.  The first is that I returned to Washington, D.C., in 1982 from eight months around Hyderabad.  I’d always thought that Washington’s uniformly truncated downtown office buildings were ugly, but now I became aware that the sidewalks were almost deserted.  If I wanted animation, I had to wait for a VIP to sweep by in a limo with escorts and sirens.  I didn’t have to wait long.

But when I say that India contains everything I also mean that most countries are preoccupied with the future.  Not India.  It rushes forward with tremendous energy yet remains saturated by ancient beliefs about the meaning of life.  That’s why those cartoons with a guru on a Himalayan crag are funny.    

I have a question for the guru.  When I was a boy, people worried about nuclear war.  In elementary school we regularly pulled the classroom shades and crouched under our desks.  My only complaint at the time was that the dog tag on a chain around my neck had a blank space where it was supposed to show my blood type.  

The risk of nuclear annihilation hasn’t gone away, but in the 1960s it was shoved off the front page, in the United States at least, by people demanding civil rights.  That demand hasn’t gone away, but in the 1970s it had to make room, like nuclear Armageddon, for worries about population growth, environmental pollution, and the loss of biodiversity.  Today’s focus is climate change, which gives me pause because I remember when scientists expected another Ice Age. 

Meanwhile we are busy building a world in which we do not fit.  We worry about the price that birds and whales and rainforests pay for progress, but we are next to oblivious about the price we ourselves pay.  

Sir Francis Bacon seems not to have seen the problem.  His Novum Organum (1620) urges us to learn the secrets of nature so we can control her.  What’s not to like?  Brought back to life, Sir Francis might attend a tech fair where he would be, as we say, blown away by really cool stuff.  René Descartes similarly assures us in his Second Meditation (1641) that, because mind and matter are separate, whatever we do in the material world has no effect on res cogitans, the “thinking thing.”   Paul Simon wrote the updated version: “I am a rock, I am an island.”

In 1900, the historian Henry Adams came to the opposite conclusion.  Looking at a giant electrical generator displayed at the Paris World’s Fair, Adams anticipated “the annihilation of all human values.”  That phrase comes not from Adams himself but from the late Lynn White, a historian of the Middle Ages who, writing about Adams, takes issue with him and argues that we should see technology as “a chapter in the conquest of freedom.”  White may be right if we’re talking about medieval technology, but there’s a big difference between a groaning waterwheel and a silently spinning dynamo.  One we understand intuitively; the other most of us do not.   

What should we do?  That’s the question I want to ask the guru, even though I’m sure he’ll come back with another question.  “What do you want?” he’ll ask.  Gurus do that: ask trick questions that sound trivial but are almost impossible to answer.  This guru is asking me to tease out what I want from all the things that I’ve been taught me to want.  Just the other day I asked a woman stacking cookies in a Walmart if she remembered some Nabisco doggerel I had repeatedly heard on the radio in the 1940s. I chanted it for her, but I should have known that she, probably in her 50s, was too young.  I did feel sorry for her knees, but I also feel sorry for my brain, clogged with jingles retired before there was television.  

I’ve been taught to want mountains of stuff, from cookies at Walmart to the mansions thrown at me every Friday in a special section of the Wall Street Journal.  But it’s not just stuff for sale.  There’s a load of political stuff, too, such as “liberty and justice for all,” which is about as realistic as mansions for all.  Maybe I really am a tabula rasa, desiring nothing on my own.  That’s scary.  I’m supposed to be my own person.

The guru, bless his heart, won’t offer any help except to repeat his Mother of All Questions question, but India will.  That’s why I’m  back.  

Over the years I’ve managed to see the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri, Khajuraho, Konark, Hampi, and Mamallapuram.  I’ve seen less visited places, too: the Dandeshwara Temple near Almora, Ramappa near Warangal, and the Badami caves east of Belgaum.  I’ve gone out of my way for temples that few Indians visit, places like the Kalla-Gudi Temple in Devgaon, between Belgaum and Dharwad.  

They’re not all crowded. I remember the lonely ruins of Kalinjar, a fortress a hundred miles south of Kanpur.  I saw only one other person there, an old man dressed in rags sitting next to a giant rock-cut image of Kali, dancing with skulls tied to her belt.  I wasn’t exactly afraid of her, but she made me uncomfortable enough that I didn’t chat with the old man.  Odds are, he didn’t speak a word of English, but he might have been a retired Oxford professor.  He could even have been an unretired Oxford professor.  India’s funny that way. 

I’d seen Ellora, too, but had missed the Ajanta Caves, even though they’re only fifty miles north of it.  My excuse—it’s an exceptionally good excuse in India—is that fifty miles isn’t always fifty miles.  By the time I got to Ajanta, in 2019, it had a parking lot with cars to one side and buses to another.  Visitors made their way from the lot through a gauntlet of tourist shops like a fantastically decrepit airport terminal.  The visitors then boarded one of the rattletrap shuttle buses that every few minutes took groups a couple of miles to a ticket office and restaurant.  From there, the visitors either walked to the caves or paid to be carried on a doli, a chair lashed onto two poles resting on the shoulders of four men.  

I avoided the crowd by starting a couple of miles away, at a deserted lookout at the top of a precipitous canyon.  Hundreds of concrete stairs led down from here about five hundred feet to a footbridge across the Waghura River.  (That’s Waghura as in wagha, “tiger” in Marathi.)  The river here makes a hundred-and-eighty-degree curve and is deeply entrenched though many layers of the flood basalt that sixty million years ago buried an area of India larger that California.   One of the basalt layers is about fifty feet thick.  Long ago, wealthy Buddhists hoping for a pleasant next life paid workmen to excavate in this layer more than thirty caves as monastic retreats for use during the monsoon.

Coming down the steps, I could see the entrances to all of them.  From the apex of the meander, the caves extended perhaps three hundred yards upstream, to the left, and a hundred and fifty yards downstream.  The shuttle buses stopped another hundred yards downstream, out of sight.  Knowing that I’d return the following day, I came down the stairs and did a run-through of the twenty caves open to the public, first those to the left, then those to the right.  

About a thousand people visit Ajanta on a slow day, and, because the buses bring them in groups, they flow through the caves like rush hour traffic at a subway station, full of people one moment, empty the next.  To shut out the chatter, I used headphones, which helped a bit.  Sometimes the pianist I was listening to would pause and someone in his audience would cough.  In a crowded cave, I didn’t notice, but when the cave was empty, I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder.

Five of the caves are two thousand years old; the rest are five centuries newer.  This age distinction is important, because the early caves served Theravada Buddhists, which is to say Buddhists for whom the Buddha was a man, not a god.  The result is that there are no images of the Buddha in these caves unless someone came along later and added one.  The later caves, on the other hand, served Mahayana Buddhists who, believing the Buddha to be divine, seem to have thought that the more images of the Buddha they had, the better.  I much prefer the early caves, but what do I know?  I can hardly use the word “aniconic” in a sentence.

All but four of the caves are viharas, or dormitories.  Whether Theravada or Mahayana, the floorplans are square and thirty to fifty feet on a side.  The ceilings are low—just out of reach—and flat, suggesting to anyone with claustrophobia the upper plate of a huge bookbinding press.  Cells have been excavated in the peripheral walls as rooms for the monks.  The cells are hardly larger than closets and are bare except for one or two benches carved out of the rock for a monk to sit or lie upon while meditating or sleeping.  Light came from lamps fueled with butter.                                    

The Mahayana dormitories, unlike the Theravada ones, doubled as temples, so in addition to the peripheral cells they have a shrine in the center of the back wall.  Not much larger than the monks’ cells, the shrine contains a larger-than-life statue of the Buddha in the teaching position, with his right elbow at his side and with the palm of that arm facing outward with the tips of his thumb and forefinger joined to form a circle.   Although the rock is strong enough that the caves don’t need internal support, the Mahayana dormitories also have a peristyle of floor-to-ceiling columns left in the bedrock.                                        

All the dormitories, whether Theravada or Mahayana, were made by excavating a tunnel, then excavating branches perpendicular to the tunnel on both sides of it, then removing the rock between the branches.  Four caves, however, were excavated by starting at a higher level and working not only to the sides but down.  The openings to these caves are not horizontal slits in the cliff face but are instead higher than they are wide, and they lead into a church-like space with a barrel-vaulted roof that allows light to reach about fifty feet to the back of the cave.  Two rows of structurally superfluous columns support the vault.                   

These four high-roofed caves are chaityas, or prayer halls, and they have room for perhaps a hundred devotees in front of a hemispherical stupa, in theory a reliquary monument of the Buddha. The stupas in the two Theravada prayer halls consist mostly of a truncated egg, or anda, resting on a cylindrical base.  

I would have liked to walk around them, but the Archaeological Survey of India has erected wooden barriers.  Monks are allowed to cross, and I saw several sitting in front of the barriers and chanting from texts on screens of cell phones exceptionally bright in the dim light.  A guard made sure I didn’t join them.  Ajanta has dozens of these guards, employees of a private security firm.  I couldn’t help wishing that somebody would go crazy just to give the guards something to do.  No dice.  Another sleepy day at a World Heritage site.

In contrast, the two Mahayana prayer halls are carnivals of ornament.  Their stupas still consist of egg and base but have large, forward-facing statues of the Buddha, in one case standing and in the other sitting.  The columns, capitals, and entablatures of these later halls are covered with dozens of images of the Buddha, some large, some small.   The only undecorated surface in these later prayer halls, other than the floor, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and it’s plain only because over the centuries it has lost the wood sheathing that originally lined it.   (By the way, about two hundred miles to the southwest, between Mumbai and Pune, there are similar caves at Lonavala that, astonishingly, retain their ancient sheathing.)                                                

Most visitors, drawn to spectacle, seem to prefer the later prayer halls, but I consider them a distraction from the Buddha’s fundamental message.   The classic statement of that message—that desire leads to suffering—is tremendously pessimistic, and I prefer inverting it to this: instead of seeking a thousand pleasures, then a thousand more, and then coming to regret that there is no time for a third thousand, focus on the pleasure I felt while patting a sandstone whale in the middle of Australia.  If there’s anything to what I’m saying, Buddhist monks are happier than they look, because they have found what they really want.  

There were no monks in the caves when the first Europeans arrived.  That was in 1819, exactly two hundred years before my visit.  Some British officers were on a tiger hunt, and local villagers took them to the larger of the two Theravada prayer halls and to at least one of the dormitories.  Abandoned for over a thousand years, the cave entrances were choked with vegetation and piles of rock that had fallen from the cliffs overhead.

None of the officers seem to have written about the visit, but two years later one William Erskine read a paper to the Bombay Literary Society in which he referred to the caves as “newly discovered.”  He continued: “Very extensive excavations have recently been discovered both at the top and bottom on the Ajunta-pass.  They have been little visited, on account of the difficulty of approaching them.”  Erskine quotes a Captain Morgan writing that the caves “were described by the officers who visited them in 1819 as having sitting figures with curled wigs.  No traces of the Brahminical religion were discovered.  The paintings were in a decent state of preservation.” 

One of the officers scratched his name on a prayer-hall column, along with the date, April 28, 1819, and his unit, the 28th Cavalry of the Madras Presidency.  I looked around without success, then  caught the attention of a guide and diverted him for a moment from his group.  Without hesitation, he shone his flashlight at a spot about seven feet above the floor, too high to reach without a ladder.  The name was there in a line so fine it seemed to have been scribed with a nail, but there it was, Captain John Smith.  

In 1824, a 21-year-old Lieutenant James Edward Alexander came by.  Back at Sandhurst, he recalled the beehives hanging from the cave roofs.  He also remembered “the fetid smell… from numerous bats (Verpertilio noctula) which flew about our faces” and “rendered a continuance inside, for any length of time, very disagreeable.”  

The bats are gone now, as are the bees. Bees and bats weren’t the only problems.  A soldier who was stationed nearby warned Alexander that “you will never return: for if you escape the tigers, these stony-hearted robbers, the Bheels, will destroy you.”  Alexander, who travelled dressed as a Muslim and who was accompanied only by servants and a guide, did run into Bhils.  He wrote that his guns scared them off.  (The Indian census of 2011 counted sixteen million Bhils, mostly in this part of India.  They are officially classified as a “scheduled tribe,” outside the Hindu mainstream.) 

Despite the bees, bats, and Bhils, Alexander wrote that he “was highly delighted with my excursion; and although many are the caverned temples which I have explored, and many which I wish to revisit, yet to none would I sooner return than to those of Adjunta.”  Alexander lived another sixty-five years, but it seems he never returned to Ajanta.  He was the leading force behind the transfer of an obelisk from Egypt to London, where, as Cleopatra’s Needle, it still famously overlooks the Thames. 

Alexander wrote of the Ajanta caves that “the pillars themselves are quite plain.  Many of them are broken off, and have fallen on the floor.”  Since then, they’ve been reassembled by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has worked at Ajanta since the mid-nineteenth century.   The work has been done so skillfully that I wouldn’t have noticed the repairs if I hadn’t read about them.  It may well be that Captain Smith scratched his name on a chunk of column lying on the cave floor.

The Archaeological Survey changed the way visitors approached Ajanta, too.  The historic path was the one I had first used: down the slope facing the caves and then across the Waghora River at the neck of its curve, then up a short flight of stairs bookended by a pair of facing and kneeling elephants, almost life-sized and carved from the cliff.  

The dormitory cave at the top of these stairs was the first to be excavated, and it became the model. The farther the cave from that initial point, the newer. Then the Survey came along and numbered the caves starting downstream and working up.  The logic was that visitors were now mostly coming from a road built downstream, but it’s confusing because the first cave visitors now saw, Cave Number One, was the last cave built, while the earliest caves built, near the stone elephants and midway in the set, are those numbered from Nine to Thirteen. 

Cave One had hardly been completed before the entire site was abandoned.  Walter Spink, an American scholar whose seven-volume study of Ajanta is unlikely to be superseded for a long time, writes that “after 480, not a single image was ever made again at the site.”  He continues with telegraphic brevity: “Situation worsens.  Craftsmen leave.  Some monks remain for a few years.  No donations at site ever again.”  The Vakataka Empire, renowned for its support of the arts, had collapsed, and King Harishena (or Harisena), who had been a major sponsor of the later caves, was succeeded by kings whose names are unknown. 

Cave One has a veranda with what Spink calls “loving couples.”  Harishena had sponsored the cave and, as Spink says, the king exercised “the prerogatives of kingship” to decorate it as he liked.  The result was that “loving couples seem to proliferate, apparently quite innocent of the use of the cave as a monastic residence.”  It’s less easy to understand why similar images decorate the entrance to Cave Twenty-Four, which was one of several later caves sponsored by a monk named Buddhabhadra.

Other sculptures at Ajanta are more in keeping with Buddhist teaching.   Cave Twenty-Six, for example, one of the two later prayer halls, has a wall carving showing Mara, a notorious Buddhist demon.  He rides an elephant straight at the Buddha and attacks not with spears but with beautiful women.  It’s no use.  The Buddha touches the earth with the fingertips of his right hand.  It’s the iconic sign of his enlightenment. 

Cave Seventeen has another warning about women.  It’s in a painting now almost faded beyond recognition.  This is a problem for all the Ajanta paintings, which once were arguably the glory of the caves.  As early as 1879, James Burgess, head of the Archaeological Survey, wrote that “unfortunately the damp, bats, native and other ignorant visitors have wrought sad ravages among these pictures.”  Several contemporaries of Burgess undertook the huge task of copying the paintings, but almost all the copies have been destroyed, some in the fire that levelled London’s Crystal Palace, some in a fire at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and some in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

The painting I’m thinking about depicts a cannibalistic variant of Ulysses and Circe.  Shipwrecked, Simhala and his crew are washed ashore on an island inhabited with irresistibly attractive women who want husbands.  The men settle down and raise families.  All seems perfect until—but of course—Simhala explores the far side of the island and finds an iron tower holding the previous batch of shipwrecked sailors-turned-husbands.  They tell Simhala that the women are man-eaters and that the tower is a holding pen.  As soon as the next unfortunates wash up, Simhala’s crew will be locked into the iron tower while they, the present occupants, will be eaten.  Simhala hurries to the other side of the island and tells his crew what he’s learned, but the alluring man-eaters seduce their foolish husbands yet again.  Simhala alone escapes to tell the tale.   

It’s a great story, but it’s hard for religions to endure on a diet of misogyny and abstinence.  Another painting in Cave Seventeen comes to the rescue with the Chhadanta jataka, one of hundreds of stories of the Buddha’s earlier lives.  In this jataka he is an elephant king with six tusks.  He has two wives, one of whom becomes jealous and decides to kill her husband.  She becomes a human queen and tells a hunter to bring her the tusks of the elephant king.  

The hunter fails to kill the elephant, but the Buddha pities him, cuts off his own tusks, gives them to the hunter, then dies in agony.   It’s a childish story until you forget the elephants and hunters and queen and get to the point.  The standard English translation, published about 1900, concludes by saying that “at the remembrance of the Great Being she was filled with so great sorrow that she could not endure it, but her heart then and there was broken and that very day she died.”  The takeaway is that people find a million ways to kill the thing that, underneath all the accumulated junk, they really want.