Ajanta
Ajanta, Part IV. Edited by G. Yazdani. (0.U.P., £14 14s.) No visitor can forget Ajanta. A long jagged scar, pocked irregu- larly with cave-doorways and rising here and there to frame a columned and sculptured facade, runs across the hillside overlook- ing a torrid and silent valley. There are many Buddhist caves in India, notable chiefly for sculpture, and among these Ajanta, even innocent of painting, would still enjoy a certain fame. Inside, the viharas are cool and dark. It is only when the guide plugs in his floodlight and sets his white screen behind it that one sees what excited Huan Tsang thirteen hundred years ago and carried the woussososowirsiftwessotototosososos"^"osw",""ov fame of these caves, prompting many imitators, to Ceylon and across Central Asia through Tun Huang to the heart of China. Here, if anywhere on earth, is realised the romantic traveller's dream of eastern art. The ceilings, though rich and intricate, are for the most part purely decorative; lucid and still, they afford the relief of contrast from the multitudinous, gently writhing figures on the walls. The latter are spread with Buddhist legends—enacted, one should hastily add, in a setting whose fantasy is if anything enhanced by a sophisticated if erratic realism. There are few of those cosmic allegories by which the Hindu sculptor committed a central theme to eternity; the monks wanted stories of the lower world full of incidents and crowd scenes, with nothing omitted but space. This realism, however finished and graceful in detail, often collides unhappily with the exigencies of narrative com- position. Hunting field and battle impinge perilously on court ritual and love-scene; the durbar in the jewel-hung palace is barely disengaged from the rump of a charging elephant; the lesser divinities have little of heaven in which to fly; one longs for the spacious mists and skies of a later China. Nevertheless, this is a world combining sylvan simplicity with wildly exotic elegance in a manner lost to the age of Marie Antoinette. The royal cook squats down in a tiny straw basha, busily cooking human flesh for a prince whose lioness mother had whelped him after licking his sleeping father's heel, which we see her doing a few feet away; a king sits listening to a sermon from Benevolent Monkey or Golden Goose, pressed upon by a troop of slim doe-eyed girl attendants, in a portico whose cornice is festooned with pearls. The virtual nudity of these female figures, often posed and modelled with con- summate grace, is set off only by smart jewellery and hair styles, for the gauzy garments of whose existence Mr. Yazdani from time to time reminds us are seldom visible except to the prying eye of faith. In Cave XVII, on which the present volume concentrates, the state of the paintings varies sadly; a scene will loom up in sudden dream-like vividness (with faces of a liveliness at times recalling the newly revealed ones of Castellamare di Stabia, but achieved more by linear means than by violent light and shadow) only to die away into dim, involuted turmoils and languors. The colour, where it remains intact, is rich and enterprising but delicate; despite the persistent overcrowding, the general effect is of a vivacious but enchanted charade. However keen the flash of temperament, this is a rainbow world where sorrow seldom bites to the bone. Often the Buddhist's gentleness, his reverence for all created things, is finely imparted; often the observant artist has captured the palace and the bazaar, the life of animals and even, in his jam-packed way, the battlefield and the jungle. Only here and there, as in Plates XXXVIII and XXXIX, where the Buddha de- scends from heaven and preaches to the kings and sages of the earth with their retinues, where the curving dancing bodies are still, the facial antics muted, and the varied but harmonious con- course disposed with exquisite precision, will Europeans find the dignity they expect from religious painting. This is a splendid scene.
This volume concludes the series begun some twenty years ago, so that now all the paintings, sculptures and inscriptions can be studied in detail. The ease and convenience with which this can be done is unfortunately another matter. The colour and photo- graphy of the plates are admirable; here and there a minute streak overlaps a border, the paper is not above criticism and print occasionally shows through at the back, but these are small blemishes. It is worth repeating, however, that the paintings of Cave XVII, which nearly all these plates depict, are in many cases so badly defaced that even were the relevant plates not arranged, as they sometimes are, in a most capricious order, their content would still be almost indecipherable even with the help of the text. The latter has graver drawbacks. It is frequently naive and at times arch and sickly; here and there it betrays a querulous nationalism, and more than once its faulty references (two on p. 55 refer to plates that do not exist) mislead the unhappy reader into a fruitless and exasperating hunt. Were it not for the very high quality of the series as a whole, for which Mr. Yazdani and the Government of Hyderabad deserve the warmest congratula- tion, these faults would hardly be worth mentioning.
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