For young readers: All the attempts to restore the Ajanta caves from 19th century to present day

After John Smith’s accidental rediscovery of the Ajanta caves while on that game-changing tiger hunt, news spread fast among not just the colonial Europeans in India, but across the seas in Britain as well. This was a startling find!

Scholars researching Eastern history, languages and cultures, from institutions like the Bombay Literary Society and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, spoke and wrote about the caves in detail. They also alerted the British East India Company, which controlled most parts of India at the time, about the delicate condition of the murals. Funds were needed urgently to safeguard them before they were destroyed – not just by nature, but also by vandals and treasure hunters who didn’t hesitate to gouge out sections of the panels to sell them in the West.

Curiously, the first attempts at restoring the murals were not to preserve the art, but to preserve memories of it for a time when the originals would fade away. Skilled artists were paid to create copies of the paintings. Some of them chose to show the murals as they were, decaying, while others created “perfect” copies.

The many attempts

1. Major Robert Gill, a soldier and painter from the Madras Army, laboured from 1844 for nearly 20 years – battling the heat, the threat of tigers, theft and disease – to produce over 30 large oil paintings on canvas. Of these, all except the last five were gutted in a fire in 1866. Not one to give up, Gill returned to Ajanta, with a camera this time, to restart the project, but died of illness before he could complete it.

2. In 1875, John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art, with a few students, began to make copies. Over 10 years, they finished around 300 oil canvases and shipped them to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum). In 1885, a massive fire destroyed 170 of those canvases. The surviving copies are still in the museum, and were eventually seen in a book published in 1896, The Paintings in the Buddhist Caves at Ajanta.

3. Over two winters in 1909 and 1910, Christiana Herringham, a 50-year-old English artist, camped at Fardapur village near Ajanta. With young Indian artists and a female English assistant, she began to copy the Ajanta murals, painting them in tempera (colour pigments with egg yolk). They were featured in a 1915 publication, Ajanta Frescoes. On returning to England, she was severely ill with delusions that she had committed a great sin by copying the paintings, and had to be admitted to a mental health facility, where she passed away.

4. Finally, in 1916, a famous Japanese artist, Arai Kampo, invited to India by Rabindranath Tagore, made copies of the Ajanta murals on Japanese tracing paper. Once finished, his work was archived at the Tokyo Imperial University until, amazingly, the jinx struck again! Kampo’s copies were destroyed in a blazing inferno during the Great Kanto earthquake of Japan in 1923.

The lack of safety measures in those times to deal with fires clearly caused these losses. But there are those who believe that something strange had been at work to stop all attempts at copying these masterpieces.

It was only in 1920 that an effort was made to actually restore the murals, not just copy them. The Ajanta caves fell in the domain of the Nizam of Hyderabad and the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, engaged the services of two Italian art restorers, Lorenzo Cecconi and Count Orsini.

Examining the murals closely, they found that Gill and Griffiths had liberally applied varnish to the paintings to brighten their colours and protect them from dampness during the monsoons. This had hardened over the years, causing fragments to flake off. Also, the varnished paintings had quickly absorbed the soot and smoke from the oil lamps that burned continuously inside, and a dark, greasy layer had formed over them.

Sadly, these early steps at preserving the murals had ended up causing even more harm.

But humans weren’t the main cause of the decay of the paintings. Insects were! The base layers had plenty of organic material – vegetable fibre, paddy husk and grass. Apart from this, the pigments themselves had animal glue as the binding agent. All this was a feast for silverfish and entire colonies of insects that had made the cave walls their home over the centuries. Burrowing directly into the paintings, they managed to destroy the very foundation on which the murals had been created.

The two Italians did their best. They delicately removed the layers of old varnish, smoke and soot with a diluted mixture of alcohol, turpentine and hydrochloric acid. To fix crumbling patches and stabilise them, they injected a mix of casein (a protein found in milk) and limewash to help bind them back to the cave surface. Finally, they added a liberal coat of unbleached shellac (an insect resin) for general preservation.

But this turned out to be a bad idea. Over time, the shellac layer oxidised and took on a translucent yellow tone, permanently changing the colour of the murals.

Since Independence, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has worked tirelessly to preserve the Ajanta murals. Using advances in science and technology – like chemical cleaning to remove the shellac and other varnish layers, X-ray photography to detect unseen cracks and hidden layers of paint below the outermost surface, and structural repairs to strengthen the caves and reduce moisture seeping in – the team has helped slow their decay. All this, combined with strict rules around visiting the caves and limiting the time spent by each person to minimise humidity levels inside, has been able to extend the life of the priceless murals.

But the grim reality is that the ageing and decay are irreversible. It is anybody’s guess as to how much longer we will be able to enjoy viewing these murals. The coming of Artificial Intelligence, in particular, has brought an exciting new development in art restoration. While there is still no available solution to “fix” the actual murals, things have come full circle and we are going back to what the “copiers” did. But this time, with computers.

There are several tools and apps now which allow for almost instant digital restoration of heritage art, helping us to visualise it as close to its original splendour as possible. Empty patches can now be filled, colour tones can be corrected, and blurred sections can be sharpened, all with the click of a button … if only on screen or in print.

Excerpted with permission from Magnificent Murals: Buddhist Art of Ajanta, Ashwin Prabhu, Tulika Books.