When, in 1819, John Smith, a British cavalry officer on a tiger hunt, mistakenly tripped upon the Ajanta Caves, he slipped back into a world that had been sculpted and painted over 1,500 years ago. The 30 Buddhist caves carved from basalt rocks curved along the horseshoe bend of the Waghora river were built in two bursts: around the 2nd century BCE, when the Buddha was aniconically represented, and around the 5th century BCE, when the Buddha was represented in flesh and blood. As Buddhism waned in the subcontinent, these caves lay abandoned until Smith’s accidental discovery.

Deep inside one of the caves, overrun with vegetation, Smith inscribed with a hunting knife his name and the date over a painted body of the Bodhisattva, the cursive hand intruding his present self into a past moment. The impulse to deface past heritage that has survived for a substantial time and ship it into the future with your name as evidence of presence is commonplace. Monuments across India are littered with the initials of lovers, lassoing to them their inscribed destiny.

But what if there is no future for the monument?

The first thing I was told when I left for Aurangabad to see the Ajanta and Ellora Caves was that I might perhaps be seeing its last gasp. India Today’s “Ajanta in Peril” issue (April 17, 2023), featuring Raghu Rai’s photographs, their colour-corrected recreations a tad ugly in their high contrasts, showing what the murals would have looked like when fresh, was brought to my attention. In it, the scholar Rajesh Kumar Singh had ominously cited 50 more years before the murals disappear completely.

Standing in front of some of these murals, or what has survived of them, I was shaken by a strange presence: the black outlines of figures and the deep blues that came from Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli. They felt like they had been painted but a few days ago, so vivid and sharp were their sheen and features. How can they disappear after surviving for 2,000 years when they give off such a whiff of recency?

Elsewhere, the site has completely deteriorated, the colours of the murals shaded into shadows of themselves—inevitable, given the crowds. Between March and November 2024, for example, over 2.5 million people flocked to Ajanta. All that breath settling and curdling the surface of the caves—what future is there?

Moreover, the act of conserving the caves has sometimes ruined some of the murals. In the 1930s, Italian conservationists used unbleached shellac, which collected grime over time, oxidising and eventually obscuring the paintings. In the late 1990s, under Rajdeo Singh, chief of conservation at the Archaeological Survey of India, and with the help of Japanese technology and funding, this was removed, and an attempt was made to retrace a path to the original forms.

Once lit by tungsten, mercury, and halogen, whose intense heat dulls the colour’s luminosity, the caves are now lit by much cooler fibre optics. Since 2014, the caves with murals (caves 1, 2, 16, 17) have had barricades placed in them, some distance from the cave walls. You need to shine a torch to see the murals clearly: phone torches do not spread their light that far, and flash photography is not allowed.

This was something I was not prepared for. I did not want the tour guides, but I wanted their torches. Even the security guards for the caves, armed with torches, made a quick buck, offering tourists private tours of a particular cave. They refused to lend me their torch. Fair enough. What if I drain the battery? Instead, I waited for guides to come and illuminate patches of the wall in quick swerves of light, for the guides do not flash the torch on for too long; you do not see the murals as paintings but as glimpses, as visions, as though in the presence of a ruptured abundance that can only trickle its way to you in forceful, intermittent bursts.

The sculptures, however, were left on their own, with the caretakers lounging about, often seated on rocks, sometimes resting their backs on the sculptures. You can see the features of the Buddha in Ajanta and of Siva, among other gods in Ellora, softening, blunting. Visitors lean on the sculptures; children run their hands over them. Is the preservation of sculptures less important than that of the murals because of their relative abundance and inferior affect? After a point, the sculptures slur in their repetitive postures. Does that deem them less worthy of preservation?

In the Aurangabad Caves (not a UNESCO heritage site, unlike Ajanta and Ellora), people, exhausted by the noontime heat, sat at the feet of the denuded and horizontal four-armed Avalokiteśvara in Parinirvana.

In Ellora, you are fully aware that you belong to the last generation to see the eye of Siva on a particular sculpture, his features melting back into the rocks from which he had once emerged. A tourist tried to climb a sculpture of Ravana holding Mount Kailash with Siva and Parvati on it. A security guard whistled loudly, and the tourist climbed back down quickly, laughed with cheeky insolence and disappeared into the crowd. The question of heritage preservation is always at odds with the question of heritage popularisation. I loved seeing kids in their Ujala blue uniforms being herded in and out of the caves by exasperated teachers, and the one cave caretaker who kept chasing them away with a stick from a cave where a beehive had taken root at its entrance. (A billowing plastic curtain was drawn over the entrance of the cave to prevent bees from entering.)

This sense of being part of a civilisation that stretches back centuries cannot possibly be evoked from replicas. Lascaux Cave in France and Altamira Cave in Spain have been shut to the public, and visitors can only see the replicas. Ajanta, too, had a visitor’s centre with a replica of the painted caves, but it has been shut for many years. What Walter Benjamin called “aura” cannot possibly be divined from imitations. To preserve something is to pit the future against the present.

Museums like the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad, for example, can only be accessed by a guided tour once a day, and one needs to book a slot weeks in advance. This provides a middle path between abandoning the present for the future and abandoning the future for the present. But tourism is not merely an arm of culture; it is also an arm of the economy, and perhaps the only way for heritage to preserve its importance is for it to be profitable, milking its every inch of presence, until there is nothing left to preserve. 

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Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.