Amaravathi: The rise and fall of one of the greatest Buddhist sites in India

In 2015, when then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu announced the making of a new capital in the Vijayawada-Guntur region, he decided to name it after the long-lost Buddhist centre of Amaravathi, dismissing the ‘h’ from the older name for numerological reasons. The new capital, Amaravati, which is once again in the making after Naidu’s return to the chief ministerial post this year, is about 20 km away from the ancient town. Although his vision is to create a modern city on the lines of Singapore, its name carries the legacy of one of the grandest and most important sites of Buddhism in South Asia.

Amaravathi and the making of Andhra Buddhism

Buddhism emerged in the fifth century BCE in the ancient kingdom of Magadh, located in the eastern Ganges plain of Southern Bihar. It appears to have reached the Andhra region in the Krishna River Valley fairly early on, mainly through trade. “We know that some monks from Andhra were present at the very first Buddhist council (held in 483 BCE at Rajgir, Bihar),” says Anirudh Kanisetti, historian and author of ‘Lords of the Deccan: Southern India From the Chalukyas to Cholas’ (2023). The real impetus to Andhra Buddhism though, came in the 3rd century BCE when the emperor Ashoka set up an inscription in the region. Thereafter, Buddhism had thrived in the region for almost six centuries till about the 3rd century CE. Although, in isolated sites such as Amaravathi, Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayapeta, Salihundam and Sankaram, the religion seems to have lingered on till as late as the 14th century CE.

Historian Sree Padma, who along with Professor A W Barber has co-edited and authored the book Buddhism in the Krishna River Valley of Andhra (2008), notes that “the presence of Buddhism in Andhra coincides with Andhra’s first urbanisation process”. “Trade, especially oceanic trade, was one of the major features of this urbanising culture, activity which no doubt abetted the spread of Buddhism,” she writes.

“Merchants in fact were important patrons of the Amaravathi Stupa,” says Kanisetti, explaining the role that commerce played in the spread of Buddhism in Andhra. “If you look at Buddhism in North India, there are so many legends about Buddha talking to king Bimbisara or Ajatashatru and then ofcourse you have emperor Ashoka actively advocating the spread of Buddhism,” he explains. “In contrast, in Andhra we don’t have a lot of legends about royal patronage. At Amaravathi, patrons came from a broad cross-section of society, especially traders, craftsmen and wandering monks who were involved in accepting and spreading Buddhism.”

Sree Padma in her work notes that the success of traders and their religious association with Buddhism was not lost on the political rulers of Andhra who would go on to issue several inscriptions announcing their donations and support to the Buddhist sangha. “Often the conversion of whole peoples is said to follow the conversion of their leaders. In Andhra of this era, perhaps the reverse process occurred,” she writes.

Yet another distinctive feature of the way Buddhism developed in this region was the easy absorption of local practices into the Buddhist doctrines. For instance, the whole concept of the Buddhist stupa here seems to have been a natural transition from the existing practice of venerating the dead in megalithic burials. Megaliths were massive stones set up over pits in which the dead were buried, and are said to have been predecessors of the Buddhist stupas which were commemorative monuments housing the relics of Buddhist monks. Other local forms of religious expression popular in the Andhra region such as Goddess and Naga (snake) worship were also incorporated into the Buddhist corpus.

Within this broad landscape of Andhra Buddhism, there was a special place that Amaravathi held. It was the birthplace of Mahayana Buddhism. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama says that Amaravathi is the most sacred site for him,” remarks Professor Amareswar Galla, an international expert in sustainable heritage development, and the former chief curator of the Amaravathi heritage town.

The remains of the Amaravathi Stupa (J M Garg in Wikimedia Commons)

He explains that Acharya Nagarjuna who propounded the Madhyamika philosophy which is the basis of Mahayana Buddhism, lived in Amaravathi for a long time, and his teachings brought about a significant shift in the practice of Buddhism. “From Amaravathi, Mahayana Buddhism spread across South Asia, China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Before the cultural revolution in China in 1969, Mahayana Buddhism was the largest faith in the world,” says Galla.

The Amaravathi school of art and its influence

The significance of Amaravathi though was hardly limited to the influence it had on religion. The stupa gave rise to what came to be known as the ‘Amaravathi school of art’ which is regarded as one of the three most important styles of ancient Indian art along with Mathura and Gandhara. Scholar of Comparative Religions, Jacob Kinnard, in a book chapter titled Amaravati at Lens: Envisioning Buddhism in the Ruins of the Great Stupa, writes, “The ruined stupa at Amaravati has been one of the most analysed structures in the history of Buddhism….celebrated by scholars as the high point of Buddhist art and architecture.” Indeed the stupa is popularly known to be the “jewel in the crown of early Indian art”.

“What makes Amaravathi distinctive is that it has the largest quantity of highly aesthetic sculpture which encased the drum of the stupa and their sheer scale is quite unparalleled,” says archaeo-metallurgist Sharada Srinivasan. She explains that the aesthetic of Amaravathi was further embellished by the fact that they were sculpted on a special kind of limestone called Palnad marble, which allowed very fine and intricate carvings.

“One must also remember that there is yet no evidence that there was any external influence on the art at Amaravathi, unlike what we find in Mathura and Gandhara where there was a lot of Graeco-Roman influence,” says Galla.

Although the enquiry into the Amaravathi Stupa had begun as early as 1816 when Colonel Mackenzie first excavated some of the ruins, the interest at this point was more around the dating and nature of the monument. It was only in the 1860s when the orientalist James Fergusson published a detailed account of the stupa in his book Tree and Serpent Worship that enquiry into the art of Amaravathi began. As Kinnard notes, this book “proved to be tremendously influential in the understanding of early Buddhist art and ritual practice”.

Srinivasan says that Amaravathi later got established as a specific style of art through the writings of 20th century scholars such as C. Sivaramamurti, and Douglas Barrett and because it spawned or was a benchmark for similar regional sculpture at early historic Buddhist sites in Andhra,Telangana and Karnataka (such as Phanigiri, Nagarjunakonda and Sannati).

The appeal of Amaravathi art is evident from the fact that it went on to influence Buddhist artistic productions in several other parts of India, such as the Ajanta caves, as well as other parts of South and Southeast Asia. “There is a particular kind of depiction of the Buddha in Amaravathi where he has the robe on the left shoulder and the other hand is in abhaya. That becomes an iconic formulation which then can be found in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Java and in several other parts of South East Asia,” says Srinivasan.

Buddha statue at Nagarjunakonda in the Amaravathi style. (Wikimedia Commons)

Further, as Kinnard writes, “These sculptures also presented a visual blueprint for a range of ritual performance that established a model of Buddhist practice that would be replicated for centuries in India and elsewhere in the Buddhist world.”

The decline of Amaravathi, and Buddhism, in Andhra

Scholars have for long pondered over the possible factors that led to the decline of Buddhism in this region, which in turn and eventually led to the withering away of this once grand Buddhist site of Amaravathi. “One possible reason was the rise of Shaivism,” explains Kanisetti. He points out that “Chinese travelers who came to Andhra in the seventh century CE found that the stupas were on a decline but the Shiva temples were thriving, and receiving patronage from aristocrats and royals.”

Sree Padma in her work has suggested that the rise and decline of Buddhism in Andhra is directly linked to the kind of socio-economic conditions prevalent in the region. Trade was the most important aspect of urbanisation in Andhra in the 3rd century BCE. The appeal of Buddhism among traders lay in its emphasis on a casteless society, which meant fewer barriers to conducting commerce. The religion underwent a decline six centuries later with the economic degradation of the region.

“Buddhist institutions rather suddenly found themselves without much patronage in the fourth century CE,” writes Sree Padma. She reasons that by the time the economy recovered, Buddhism had changed so much that it lost resonance with the deeper structures of religion in Andhra. It is possible, she suggests, that as a transformed religion it was a very poor competitor to other forms of religion such as Shaivism which better catered to the needs of the next wave of urbanisation.

As far as the stupa at Amaravathi is concerned, veneration for it did linger on for several centuries after the decline of Buddhism, but its aura had been diminishing gradually over the years. By the time Mackenzie took note of the stupa, much of it had already been lost.

With the colonial interest in the monument, its destruction and eventually the loot of the ruins reached new heights. Following Mackenzie’s survey, a considerable number of sculptures were removed from the site and sent to places like Masulipatam, Calcutta, London, and Madras. Art historian Akira Shimada in his book Early Buddhist Architecture in Context (1968) notes that about 37 sculptures sent to

Masulipatam were in fact used for building a monument by Francis W. Robertson, the head assistant to the collector there. He points out that a “major purpose of Mackenzie’s survey was in fact to collect sculptures for that monument”.

In 1845, when Walter Elliot, the commissioner of Guntur, undertook yet another round of excavation at Amaravathi, he sent away a large number of sculptures to Madras. Reports suggest that during this period, two of the 79 sculptures collected by Elliot were lost.

In 1859, a collection of the sculptures, now called Elliot marbles, was shipped across to London where they experienced further deterioration. They reached London in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt and the termination of the East India Company. They moved around quite a bit in London and remained largely in a condition of neglect till as late as 1880 when they finally found a home in the British Museum.

Shimada in his book explains that “the tragic story of Amaravati exemplifies typical problems faced by archaeological monuments during this period.” In the early 19th century when Amaravathi was first surveyed, the conservation of ancient monuments was hardly a priority among government circles. “Indeed, the local people had regarded the old stupa as convenient sources of building materials, while British officials also used them for construction of canals and roads,” he writes.

“The British made the first landscape drawings of the Amaravathi Heritage Town, but never excavated Amaravathi Stupa in a systematic way,” says Galla.

Plan of the Amaravati Stupa as sketched by Colin Mackenzie in 1816. (Wikimedia Commons)

Today the sculptures from the Amaravathi stupa and other sites in Andhra are scattered across the world. While the British Museum has one of the largest collections, they can also be found in the Art Institute of Chicago, Musee Guimet in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Government Museum, Chennai and National Museum in New Delhi among others.

In recent years Australia remains to be the only country to have returned a stolen Amaravathi style sculpture from Chandavaram they had under the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. This, says Galla, was done because he managed to identify the Chandavaram sculpture in Australia. He studied it earlier while working on it for his doctoral thesis in the 1970s while it was still in situ.

“The reason why Australia returned the sculpture was because of their own policies on provenance research and repatriation,” says Galla. “India basically services western museums. They loan objects for exhibitions in London, Paris, Tokyo but rarely conduct systematic provenance research and seek proactive repatriation,” he argues. He goes on to emphasise upon the lack of consciousness among Indians, especially Andhra people about their own heritage which he believes is equally responsible for the decline of the “largest Buddhist stupa in South Asia.”

Sculptures from the Amaravati Stupa in the British Museum (Wikimedia Commons)

“Did you know that there is not a single university in India that teaches a designated programme on the Amaravathi School of Art?” he asks before adding, “it is only the Art Institute of Chicago that does the honours.”

Meanwhile, at Amaravathi, says Srinivasan, one can hardly find any trace of the legacy of the long and grand Buddhist past, apart from the site museum. “But one can clearly see the interest of the global Buddhist community in the stupa as many pilgrims from East Asia and South East Asia are frequent visitors there,” she says. “In fact, it is a Japanese publication, the Asahi Shimbun, which in the 1990s funded the reconstruction and conservation of the gallery in the British Museum which holds many of the Amaravathi sculptures today.”