Ajanta Painting Sculpture Architecture

Annotation. Volume Two begins with the contentious, yet challenging, views of Hans Bakker and Richard Cohen, both of whom are involved with an overview of Ajanta's development. This is explored further in shorter essays by Karl Khandalavala, Arvind Jamkhedkar, and Brahmanand Deshpande. At the same time, the author presents a detailed analysis of the form and development of Cave 26, as a model upon which his other arguments are built.

Ajanta:Year by Year is planned as a biography of this remarkable site, starting with the earliest caves, dating from some two thousand years, to its startling renaissance in the brief period between approximately 462 and 480. Concentrating on the excavations of the later period, during the reign of the Vakataka emperor Harisena, it attempts to show how, after a surprising gap of some three hundred years, Ajanta’s proud and pious courtly patrons and its increasingly committed workmen created not only the greatest but the latest monument of India’s Golden Age. Nearly three hundred illustrations, in color and black and white, reveal the exuberant flowering of Ajanta and related Vakataka monuments, as well as the manner of their sudden demise.

This book about the cave paintings of Ajanta where the author tried to reveal out the pulse of those ancient paintings of Ajanta cave, in the light of his artistic knowledge and some hidden backgrounds he discovered from several resources. His artistic discussion is not only related to the grammatical aspects of art but also enlighten the soul of Buddhist spiritualism which is necessary to realize the inner soul of those paintings.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.