Caved In

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IT was a life-transforming moment for photographer Benoy Behl when he entered Cave 26 on the horseshoe bend of the Waghorra river in Maharashtra, a decade ago. Inside the dark cavernous hall of the Ajanta, there were three dozen interlinked caves adorned with large paintings of battles and palaces. One of them, a portrait of Buddha, affected Behl profoundly. ‘‘It was the perfect picture of calmness. It gave my life a new meaning,’’ says Behl, who toured the caves with a hand-held camera, shooting them by standing on rickety tables.

It became Behl’s mission to expose the works of these anonymous, dead artists. He returned to the Ajanta caves twice to extensively record the mural paintings dating back to 2nd century BC that flourished during the reign of Harisena of the Vakataka dynasty between 460 BC and 477 BC. But his project kept growing. ‘‘There is always a mystery attached to how murals as an art form vanished into oblivion. My view is that it not only exists in India, but outside as well,’’ he says.

Behl’s research into Ajanta spilled over to encompass the 5th century Bagh rock caves in Madhya Pradesh, temples in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, palaces in Rajasthan, monasteries in Ladakh and the 18th century Convent of Santa Monica in Goa.

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While his personal archive has 27,000 photographs, Behl lectures across international universities to ‘‘plug the gap’’ in the story of the pan-Asian mural tradition.

At a recent exhibition called Legacy of India at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Centre, Behl juxtaposed 80 photographs of the Ajanta caves against the 18th century Bhupatindra Malla’s palace in Bhaktapur, Nepal; King Norodom’s 1816 imperial estate in Indonesia; Sigriya and Dambula caves in Sri Lanka and Bagan in Burma to tell a similar story. ‘‘I want to show India’s long mural history, its reach across southeast Asia, and the inner spirit of those ancient people,’’ he says. Behl intends to show that all these sites share a common artistic heritage inherited from Chitrasutra, the Puranic treatise that laid down the basic rules on how to paint a sad or a happy face.

The way he used the images evoked an essence of beauty and lyricism in these paintings. From the massive ceiling of a 9th century Jaina cave in Sittannavasal, Tamil Nadu, he immaculately captured a portrait of a smiling fish in a ripple-filled lotus pond. In another, he blew up the minute details of a dhoti worn by a prince while on a hunt, to offer an off-centre view of the intricate patterns and colours in a 10th century temple in Ladakh.

After a book on the Ajanta Caves and a documentary series on Indian art, Behl began working on a 26-part series on Indian sculptures last week and is due to visit museums across the world that store Indian sculptures.

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