Sometime in 1910, artist Christiana Herringham left her home in London for India and travelled to reach the Ajanta Caves in Central India, which she had visited four years earlier.
The artist wanted to recreate the centuries old paintings on the cave walls, as they were deteriorating at a rapid clip. The other artists who started working with her to copy the paintings were Nandalal Bose, Asit Haldar, Samarendranath Gupta, Syed Ahmad, and Mohammed Fazl-ud-Din Qazi.
Boddhisatva Padmapani
The Hyderabad artist, Syed Ahmad, copied the Boddhisatva Padmapani in Cave 1 in a compassionate mood on a paper with fidelity to every line in cave painting. The artists took a decision to gloss over the blemishes and holes in the plasterwork of the Ajanta caves. They created some of the most enduring artworks from India that have been part of school textbooks, diaries and mementoes.
Now, some of these paintings housed inside the Ajanta Gallery of Telangana State Museum near Public Gardens in Hyderabad are being restored with the collaboration of Noor International Microfilm Centre with the Department of Heritage Telangana.
“Noor Microfilms from Iran has extensive experience in conserving manuscripts and documents. The Ajanta paintings are on paper and we expect them to be conserved so that they can last for many more years and in a good state of preservation, as they bring their proprietary techniques and materials,” says Bharathi Hollikeri of the Department of Heritage Telangana.
“The conservation and restoration we plan to do is completely reversible. If a new technology comes up in the next few years, what we are doing can be undone. We are using natural substances and herbs like the extract of neem tree for the process,” informs Mehdi Khajehpiri, director of Noor Microfilms. The organisation has earlier worked with the Telangana State Archives as well as the National Archives on manuscripts and documents.
The conservation effort could not have come at the right time. Some of the paintings are not just time-worn but have been vandalised. One of the vandals stabbed the ‘Make up scene from Cave XVII’ and wrote the date 27/7/17 and signed it with a K. The museum practices of focused lights and glass casing have not helped matters.
“Some of the paintings are stored inside a room. I hope they are not just restored but given a pride of place considering their importance,” says an archivist who has seen the collection.
A global effort
The collaboration with an Iranian company caps a global effort over hundreds of years to save, cherish and document one of the prized cultural treasures of mankind with Italian, Hungarian, Russian and British help.
The Ajanta Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have paintings and sculptures that were created during the Satavahana rule over Central and Southern India between 200-100 BCE and were discovered by British soldiers in 1819. This was at a time when the area was under the control of Nizams in Hyderabad.
The first copies and even some stereoscopic photographs were made by Madras Army soldier of the East India Company Major Robert Gill. In 1862, a collection of stereoscopic photographs were published but were destroyed in the 1866 blaze during an exhibition at Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Another fire in South Kensington destroyed another set of paintings drawn by John Griffiths with the help of students of the Bombay School of Art.
In this scenario, Herringham and her team stepped in and painted them with an everyday four-mile bullock cart ride from the Dak Bungalow, a mile on foot and and then a trek up the caves. The artists’ camp was a 17-mile ride in a bullock cart from the railway station of Jalgaon.
“I feel more than ever convinced that no effort should be spared to reproduce all remains, whatever their state of preservation, and by the only extant process capable of assuring complete fidelity as regards colours,” wrote Hungarian archaeologist Auriel Stein after his visit to the caves at the behest of John Marshall of Archaeological Survey of India.
Later in 1920s, Nizam Osman Ali Khan hired the services of Italian artist and restorer Lorenzo Cecconi and his assistant Orsini. Just after this restoration, Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova visited the caves and was inspired to get her choreographer create ‘Ajanta Frescoes’. Through it all, Syed Ahmed and Mohammad Fazl-ud-Din Qazi continued to visit and paint the frescoes.
Once these paintings are restored with Iranian help, visitors to Hyderabad will have something to look forward to beyond the regular tourist haunts.
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