Roughly 100 kilometres apart in the Indian state of Maharashtra sit two clusters of caves that are not, in the ordinary sense, built at all. Ajanta and Ellora were carved: teams of stonemasons working from the top of a basalt cliff downward and inward, removing rock rather than assembling material, to leave behind temples, monasteries, and — at Ellora — a structure larger than the Parthenon excavated as a single continuous piece of stone.
This article looks at both sites in turn: Ajanta's Buddhist caves and their famous paintings, and Ellora's remarkable arrangement of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves side by side, including the Kailasa temple, widely regarded as one of the most ambitious single construction projects — if "construction" is even the right word — of the ancient world.
Introduction: Subtraction as Architecture
Nearly all architecture most readers picture — from Roman temples to Mughal forts — is additive: material quarried elsewhere, then assembled on site. Rock-cut architecture inverts that logic entirely. A cliff face is the starting material, and a structure is produced by removing everything that is not the structure, working from the outside in and, often, from the top down, with no scaffolding possible on the interior until the excavation is complete. Mistakes could not be corrected by adding material back. Both Ajanta and Ellora are, in this sense, sculptures at the scale of buildings.
Ajanta: A Horseshoe of Buddhist Caves
Ajanta's thirty caves are cut into a dramatic horseshoe-shaped cliff above the Waghur river gorge, in two broad phases: an earlier phase beginning around the 2nd century BCE, and a second, more prolific Mahayana Buddhist phase from roughly the 5th century CE under the patronage of the Vakataka dynasty, particularly during the reign of Harishena. The caves divide into two architectural types: chaitya-grihas (worship halls, typically containing a carved stupa) and viharas (residential monastery halls, with cells cut into the surrounding rock for monks).
Work at Ajanta appears to have ended relatively abruptly in the late 5th or early 6th century CE, likely tied to the decline of Vakataka patronage, leaving several caves visibly unfinished — a rare and valuable window into the excavation process itself, since finished caves erase the evidence of how they were made.
The Caves in Images
The photographs below move from Ajanta's dramatic cliff-face setting through to Ellora's carved stone halls.
The Paintings That Made Ajanta Famous
Ajanta's greater art-historical fame rests less on its architecture than on its wall paintings — among the earliest and best-preserved substantial bodies of ancient Indian painting to survive, executed in a technique closer to fresco-secco (pigment applied to a dry, prepared mud-and-lime plaster ground) than true buon fresco. The paintings depict Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha's previous lives), courtly and everyday scenes, and celestial figures, rendered with a sophistication of line, gesture, and modelled shading that had a documented influence on later Buddhist art traditions across Central Asia and East Asia via trade and pilgrimage routes.
Long exposure to humidity, smoke from local use of the caves before formal protection, and 19th-century restoration attempts using unsuitable materials have all damaged the paintings to varying degrees; a number of copies made by British and Indian artists in the 19th and early 20th centuries — including a set destroyed in an 1866 fire in London — are now themselves valuable historical records of paintings that have since faded further.
Ellora: Three Faiths, One Cliff
Ellora's thirty-four caves, cut into the western-facing Charanandri hills roughly 30 kilometres from Ajanta, were excavated later and over a longer span — approximately the 6th to 10th centuries CE — and are distinguished by containing Buddhist (caves 1–12), Hindu (caves 13–29), and Jain (caves 30–34) monuments within the same cliff, largely in that rough chronological and geographic sequence. This makes Ellora, unusually among major religious sites anywhere in the ancient world, a single physical location whose art and architecture document the coexistence and successive royal patronage of three distinct religious traditions across several centuries, rather than the output of one tradition alone.
The Kailasa Temple: Carved Downward, Not Built Up
Ellora's centrepiece is Cave 16, the Kailasa (or Kailasanatha) temple — a monolithic structure dedicated to Shiva, excavated under Rashtrakuta patronage (most scholarship credits substantial work to King Krishna I, r. c. 756–773 CE, though the project's full chronology remains debated). Unlike every other cave at either site, Kailasa was carved as a free-standing structure, isolated from the surrounding rock on all sides by trenches dug first, then sculpted inward and downward to produce a complete temple complex — gateway, courtyard, subsidiary shrines, and a main shrine with a shikhara tower — out of a single mass of basalt, with estimates of over 200,000 tonnes of rock removed.
There is no comparable structure known to have been produced by pure subtractive excavation at this scale anywhere else in the premodern world; estimates of the labour and time required vary considerably across scholarship, reflecting genuine uncertainty rather than an agreed figure, but all serious estimates describe a project of multiple decades even under sustained, well-resourced royal patronage.
Abandonment and Rediscovery
Both sites fell out of active religious use for extended periods — Ajanta once Buddhist institutional presence in the region declined between roughly the 7th and 10th centuries, gradually reclaimed by forest, while Ellora saw more continuous, if reduced, use and remained locally known throughout. Ajanta's "rediscovery" by the British is conventionally dated to 1819, when a British East India Company officer, John Smith, reportedly noticed the cave entrances while on a tiger-hunting expedition — a framing best read as a rediscovery for European colonial audiences and institutions specifically, since local communities in the surrounding region had ongoing knowledge of the caves throughout.
Systematic documentation, conservation, and archaeological study began under British colonial administration through the 19th and early 20th centuries and continued under the Archaeological Survey of India after Indian independence. Both Ajanta and Ellora were inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1983, and both remain active tourist and pilgrimage destinations, requiring ongoing conservation work to balance public access against the fragility of the paintings and stonework.
References & Further Reading
- Walter M. Spink, Ajanta: History and Development (multi-volume, Brill, 2005–2017) — the most extensive modern chronological study of the Ajanta caves
- James Burgess & James Fergusson, Cave Temples of India (1880; various reprints) — an early systematic survey, useful today mainly for historiography
- Carmel Berkson, Ellora: Concept and Style (Abhinav Publications, 1992)
- M.K. Dhavalikar, Ellora (Archaeological Survey of India monograph series)
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Ajanta Caves" and "Ellora Caves" (inscription documentation, 1983)
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