Ajanta & Ellora Caves

These are two separate sites, a hundred kilometres apart on either side of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, and together they cover a thousand years of Indian rock-cutting. Ajanta came first: thirty Buddhist caves cut into a horseshoe cliff above the Waghora river, begun around the second century BCE and finished in a great burst under the Vakatakas in the fifth century, then abandoned and swallowed by forest until a British officer hunting tigers stumbled on them in 1819. Their glory is paint.

In Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17, courts, lovers, dancers, elephants and the bodhisattva Padmapani survive in earth pigment on plaster, the finest ancient painting anywhere in Asia. Ellora is later, roughly the sixth to the tenth century, and it holds Buddhist, Hindu and Jain caves cut side by side in the same escarpment, a rare picture of three faiths sharing a hill. Its centre is Cave 16, the Kailasa temple: not built but excavated top down from a single basalt hillside by Rashtrakuta masons under Krishna I, with courtyards, bridges, elephants and a full spire, all of it subtraction rather than addition.

Give each site a full day, start at opening time, and hire a guide with a torch, because the sculpture only shows itself when someone raises the light.