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Clock companies, apartment buildings, beer bars, inns and lodges, toothbrushes and the Indian art world all pay homage to it because the word ‘Ajanta’ is emblematic of Indian art and beauty. It is so steeped in modern Indian consciousness that ‘Ajanta’ keeps appearing in books, novels, songs, movies and every other form of popular culture.

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But we owe the popularity of the Ajanta cave paintings to the work done by one of the country’s premier art schools – Mumbai’s Sir J J School of Art – whose extensive documentation of the murals helped give Indian art an identity and went on to revolutionise it. It also changed the parameters by which the world began to look at Indian art.

This documentation exercise started a couple of decades after the murals at Ajanta were rediscovered in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district. Dated to between the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE, and regarded as one of the finest picture galleries from the ancient world, the murals were rediscovered by a British officer in

But the actual study of these astonishing murals, of Buddhist religious art, started with the spread of facsimiles of these paintings and is a fascinating story. Copies of Ajanta’s murals were used as teaching material in art schools, and went on to influence everything, from painting to sculpture and even pottery produced by students in art schools in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

There were three premier art schools in India at the time, the first to be established being the Government College of Fine Arts in Madras, in 1850. Then there was the Government College of Art in Calcutta, set up in the 1850s, and later Kala Bhavan in

In Bombay, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi industrialist and philanthropist, felt that Indians could achieve exceptional heights in painting and sculpture if they received proper training. Towards this end, he donated funds to the British government to establish an art school in Bombay. Renamed the

In time, Ajanta’s murals grew increasingly famous, and many artists and photographers started reproducing them.