AJANTA CAVES

The Ajanta Caves (1983) Maharashtra :

The UNESCO Heritage site of Ajanta caves is located in Aurangabad, Maharashtra. These caves were excavated as a part of the first wave of cave architecture in India. It became an important center for Buddhist religion and art under the enlightened patronage of the Vakataka rulers. However, it is important to note that the excavations of these caves happened in different phases in different time periods beginning in the 2nd Century.

The aerial view of the site looks like a horseshoe. This site was abandoned during the 6th-7th centuries and was rediscovered only during the British period by an Army officer named John Smith (1819).

Ajanta Caves - A brief summary

Buddhism is mainly divided into two groups Hinyana and Mahayana. The Ajanta Caves perfectly display the fine line of transfer between these two Buddhist sects. The Hinyana sect did not use to revere any deity, and this group worship stupas and the similar rock forms to embody Buddha. On the other hand, Mahayana sect used the idols of different god and goddess they believed in. It is an interesting factor that the Ajanta Caves incorporate both the Prayer Halls (known as Chaitya) and monasteries. These caves also include both the types of Hinyana and Mahayana art, architecture, painting and scriptures. 

                   cave - 9 (Hinyana )

The caves representing the Hinyana are cave number 8, 9, 10, 12, 13 and 15, while the caves related to Mahayana sect are numbered as 1, 2, 16, 17, 19, 26. Among the Mahayana caves, 19 and 26 are the prayer halls.

                  Cave no 1(Mahayana)

Cave number 1 and 2 display some fascinating paintings that depict Jataka Tales (Jatak Katha). Another common illustration of wonderful sculpture is the idol of Buddha delivering sermons in sitting position. Cave no. 10 also depicts Jatak Katha, and also brags some beautiful images of Buddha. The caves number 16 and 17 startlingly exemplify the peerless architecture through the images of the child and youth time of Lord Buddha, Jatak Katha, Saraswati Tales, etc.

 Cave number-16

The caves numbering from 20 to 25 were used for residence in olden days. The Caves from 1 to 8, except number 4 and 7, and then from 14 to 17, are the monasteries.

The Rock-Cut Architecture

The intricate carvings, roofs, pillars, stupas, assembly halls, etc. from the distinct essence of the architecture of Ajanta Caves. There are twenty-nine caves in Ajanta with Chaityas and Viharas as the two dominant types. Chaityas house the stupas and served as the centers for worship while Viharas served as the monastery for study and learning.

 

Hidden away in the hills of Northwest India, some 200 miles from the busy streets of Mumbai, emerge a magnificent jewel of art and religion: the Ajanta Caves. There are about 30 rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 or 650 CE. The Ajanta cave paintings and rock cut sculptures are described as among the finest surviving examples of ancient Indian art, particularly expressive painting that present emotion through gesture, pose and form. According to UNESCO, these are masterpieces of Buddhist religious art that influenced Indian art that followed. The caves were built in two phases, the first group starting around the 2nd century BC, while the second group of caves built around 400–650 AD according to older accounts, or all in a brief period of 460 to 480 according to Walter M. Spink.

Mural paintings survive from both the earlier and later groups of caves. Several fragments of murals preserved from the earlier caves (Caves 9 and 11) are effectively unique survivals of ancient painting in India from this period, and “show that by Sātavāhana times, if not earlier, the Indian painter had mastered an easy and fluent naturalistic style, dealing with large groups of people in a manner comparable to the reliefs of the Sāñcī toraņa crossbars”. Four of the later caves have large and relatively well-preserved mural paintings which, states James Harle, “have come to represent Indian mural painting to the non-specialist”, and represent “the great glories not only of Gupta but of all Indian art”. They fall into two stylistic groups, with the most famous in Caves 16 and 17, and apparently later paintings in Caves 1 and 2. The Ajanta frescos are classical paintings and the work of confident artists, without cliches, rich and full. They are luxurious, sensuous and celebrate physical beauty, aspects that early Western observers felt were shockingly out of place in these caves presumed to be meant for religious worship and ascetic monastic life.

The main colours used were red ochre, yellow ochre, brown ochre, lamp black, white and lapis lazuli which was imported from Northern India, central Asia and Persia. The green was made by mixing this lapis lazuli with Indian yellow ochre. In the pictorial cycles, all the characters are bright and multi-coloured but are never repeated, a fundamental concept in Indian art. Ceilings, walls and pilasters are all covered with overlapping figures, brought to life by the artists with strong and contrasting colours. The painting techniques at Ajanta are similar to European fresco technique. The primary difference is that the layer of plaster was dry when it was painted. First, a rough plaster of clay, cow dung, and rice husks were pressed on to the rough cave walls. This was then coated with lime juice in order to create a smooth working surface.

 original left, it's copy by Lady Herringham (1915) 

The paintings have deteriorated significantly since they were rediscovered, and a number of 19th-century copies and drawings are important for a complete understanding of the works. A number of attempts to copy the Ajanta paintings began in the 19th century for European and Japanese museums. Some of these works have later been lost in natural and fire disasters. In 1846 for example, Major Robert Gill,  an Army officer from Madras presidency. and a painter, was appointed by the Royal Asiatic society to make copies of the frescos on the cave walls Gill worked on his painting at the site from 1844 to 1863. He made 27 copies of large sections of murals, but four were destroyed in a fire at  the crystal palace in London in 1866, where they were on display.Gill returned to the site, and recommenced his labours, replicating the murals until his death in 1875.

Painted ceiling depicting Life circle of Lord Buddha

The paintings in the Ajanta caves predominantly narrate the Jataka tales. These are Buddhist legends describing the previous births of the Buddha. These fables embed ancient morals and cultural lores that are also found in the fables and legends of Hindu and Jain texts. The Jataka tales are exemplified through the life example and sacrifices that the Buddha made in hundreds of his past incarnations, where he is depicted as having been reborn as an animal or human.

The other type of main hall architecture is the narrower rectangular plan with high arched ceiling type  chaitya - griha, literally, "the house of stupa". This hall is longitudinally divided into a nave and two narrower side aisles separated by a symmetrical row of pillars, with a stupa  in the apse. The stupa is surrounded by pillars and concentric walking space for circumambulation. 

The first of Ajanta caves were started in about the first century B.C.  that included the impressive chaitya hall, cave 10 and simple associated vihara cave 12 all done by true community effort The repainting in old Hinayana cave no 9 &10 was made in but the plan was never realized except by painting some more areas of the cave .

This picture Showing View of Hinayana Caves 9 & inner view of Cave 13.

 In course of time when two chaitya hall caves 19 and 26 were still being roughed up, the controlling officials have decided that the two caitya halls should be oriented to the solstice’s, cave 19 to winter solstices and cave 26 to summer. The sun rays should coincide with the axis of cave. Such a significant astrological alignment must have meaning and importance to the planners. This was all very well had the excavation of two caves not already been started at a quite different angle. In fact, the cutting of both the caves had proceeded to the point that new required adjustment could not be effected. rock cut monasteries at both Ajanta and Bagh was developed by  their respective patrons in Vakataka period 3-4 A.D. Undertaking Ajanta excavation some 400 to 500 years after the Hinayana phase must have involved advance planning as well as supporting patrons, monks, workers, who must have come from number of different parts of the Vakataka empire.It seems clear that when such a major cave was started, the delegation of architects (now the excavators) and members of Buddhist sangha must have surveyed the site, deciding upon the best and appropriate location. In the case of vast cave 26 complexes, patronized by Asmaka, they were careful to choose the The two impressive caitya hall of cave 19&26 conceived as intended ceremonial centers for the site. The former (cave 19) is referred as “Vakataka” area including the entire excavation upto cave 20. The other (cave 26) is described as “Asmaka” area starting with cave 21 to 28. The Asmaka were in fact feudatories of the Vakataka emperor.

Words count :1525

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser:

Born:

 

1552 or 1553 London England

Died:

January 13, 1599 London England

Notable Works:

 

"The Faerie Queene"

INTRODUCTION:-

" Spenser is at once the child of the Renaissance and the Reformation. On one side we may regarded him with Milton as

 "the sage and serious Spenser"

 on the other he is the 

humanist, alive to the finger-tips with the sensuous beauty of the Southern Romance."

 the sensuous beauty of the Southern Romance

Edmund Spenser is considered one of the preeminent poets of the English language. He was born into the family of an obscure cloth maker named John Spenser, who belonged to the Merchant Taylors’ Company and was married to a woman named Elizabeth, about whom almost nothing is known. Since parish records for the area of London where the poet grew up were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, his birth date is uncertain, though the dates of his schooling and a remark in one of his sonnets (Amoretti 60) lend credence to the date traditionally assigned, which is around 1552. Spenser’s reinvention of classical pastoral, The Shepheardes Calendar, was admired by Sir Philip Sidney as a major contribution to the development of English literature and national culture. His epic poem, The Faerie Queene, was written in honor of Queen Elizabeth I and in celebration of the Tudor dynasty. Along with Sidney, Spenser set out to create a body of work that could parallel the great works of European poets such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and extend the line of English literary culture began by Chaucer. Among Spenser’s many contributions to English literature, he is the originator and namesake of the Spenserian stanza and the Spenserian sonnet.

English poet whose long allegorical poem "The Faerie Queene" is one of the greatest in the English language. It was written in what came to be called the spenserian stanza.

Youth and education

Little is certainly known about Spenser. He was related to a noble Midlands family of Spencer, whose fortunes had been made through sheep raising. His own immediate family was not wealthy. He was entered as a “poor boy” in the Merchant Taylors grammar school, where he would have studied mainly Latin, with some Hebrew, Greek, and music.

In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old, his English versions of poems by the 16th-century French poet joachim du Bellamy  and his translation of a French version of a poem by the Italian poet petrarch appeared at the beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no doubt commissioned by its chief author, the wealthy Flemish expatriate jan Baptista van der noot.

From May 1569 Spenser was a student in Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the university of Cambridge where, along with perhaps a quarter of the students, he was classed as a sizar—a student who, out of financial necessity, performed various menial or semi-menial duties. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic,  Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received the Master of Arts degree in 1576.

His best-known friend at Cambridge was the slightly older Gabriel Harvey , a fellow of Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature but also pedantic, devious, and ambitious. There is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the atmosphere of social mobility. and among the new aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not surprising that he hoped for preferment to higher position.

Spenser’s period at the University of Cambridge: was undoubtedly important for the acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of the Latin and some of the Greek classic but also of the Italian, French, and English literature of his own and earlier times. His knowledge of the traditional forms and themes of lyrical and narrative poetry provided foundations for him to build his own highly original compositions. Without the Roman epic poet Virgil’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and, later, Torquato’s Tasso Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Spenser could not have written his heroic, or epic, poem The Faerie Queene. Without Virgil’s Bucolics and the later tradition of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, Spenser could not have written The Shepheardes Calender. And without the Latin, Italian, and French examples of the highly traditional marriage ode and the sonnet and canzone forms of Petrarch and succeeding sonneteers, Spenser could not have written his greatest lyric, Epithalamion, and its accompanying sonnets, Amoretti. The patterns of meaning in Spenser’s poetry are frequently woven out of the traditional interpretations—developed through classical times and his own—of pagan myth, divinities, and philosophies and out of an equally strong experience of the faith and doctrines of Christianity; these patterns he further enriched by the use of mediaeval and contemporary story, legend, and folklore. 

Spenser’s religious training was a most important part of his education. He could not have avoided some involvement in the bitter struggles that took place in his university over the path the new church of England was to tread between Roman Catholicism and extreme Puritanism, and his own poetry repeatedly engages with the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism and the need to protect the national and moral purity of the Elizabethan church. Contrary to a former view, there is little reason to believe that he inclined toward the Puritanical side. His first known appointment (after a blank of several years, when he may have been in the north of England) was in 1578 as secretary to Bishop John Young of Rochester, former master of Spenser’s college at Cambridge. 

Spenser’s first important publication, 'The Shepheardes Calender' (1579 or 1580), is more concerned with the bishops and affairs of the English church than is any of his later work.Spenser's masterpiece is the epic poem "The Faerie Queene". The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and the second set of three books were published in 1596. Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest poems in the English language. It is an allegorical work, and can be read as Spenser presumably intended on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth 1 In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. In Spenser's "A Letter of the Authors", he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises", and that the aim behind The Faerie Queene was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline".

The Faerie Queene

Poem by Edmund spenser

An allegory is a story in verse or prose with double meaning: a primary or surface meaning; and secondary or underlying meaning. In an allegory something is presented in the guise of another. 

Allegorically, In Book 1 of The faerie Queene Spenser has shown the fight between vices and virtues and finally the triumph of virtue. Now we need a critical discussion that The Faerie Queene is an allegory.

 

"Spenser highlighted Twelve ethical virtues in the Faerie Queene"

Moral and spiritual allegory in The Faerie Queene deals with the action and interaction of virtues and vices. The good characters stand for the various virtues and the bad characters stand for the corresponding vices. The Red Cross Knight stands for Holiness, and Lady Una, Truth and Goodness. Her parents symbolize Human race and the Dragon who has imprisoned them stands for evil. The mission of Holiness is to help Truth fight Evil and thus regain its rightful place in the human heart. Thus the Red Cross Knight encouraged by Lady Una kills the monster error and marches ahead on his way. This is the first moral truth taught by the story. Archimago, the magician, who symbolizes Hypocrisy is an evil in disguise. His mission is to work out sinister design and intrigues against the Red Cross Knight and the Lady Una so that they may be separated from each other. 

 

The moral and spiritual allegory blends with the religious allegory of the book. The Reformation was the most important religious movement of the time and in his epic Spenser has represented it allegorically. He is strong supporter of the Reformed Church of England, which is the only true church for him, and against Papacy and the Catholic Church. Here Red Cross Knight stands for the Reformed Church of England. The parents Lady Una represent Humanity, and the foul dragon who has imprisoned them is the Pope of Rome. The Monster Error allegorically stands for error or mistakes which human beings make in course of their lives. The fight of the Red cross knight with the monster error, symbolizes the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism. The books and papers vomited by Error allude to the scurrilous pamphlets directed against Queen Elizabeth by the Roman Catholics.

 

The moral and religious allegories are mingled with political allegory in The Faerie Queene. According to political allegory, the Red Cross Knight is St. George of England and Lord Leicester is Prince Arthur. Lady Una stands for Truth which is represented by the National Church of England. Una’s parents are the people of England who are hold in subjection by Roman Catholicism represented by the Dragon (Antichrist). The Monster Error is one of the powerful but evil forces of Roman Catholicism. Archimago stands for Philip-2 of Spain, who was a Roman Catholic by faith. Archimgo, one instrument of the separation between the Red Cross Knight (Holiness) and Lady Una (Truth), may also be identified with the Roman Catholic Pope. 

 

To conclude, according to above discussion, we can say that Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” is one of the greatest allegorical epic we have ever read in English literature. It is an excellent moral and spiritual allegory.

Conclusion  : -

" Spenser's poetry is steeped in the humanism of the classics and Italian literature, and  it everywhere testifies to the strenuous idealism and moral earnest of Protestantism."

                              - Hudson

         Spenser, a true child of Renaissance , is     thoroughly imbued with the classical spirit and his acquaintance with classical writers is perfect . He was influenced by Plato, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. It was Plato who taught Spenser to view the beauty of the physical world as a symbol of divine beauty. According to this philosopher ,

 

        " All that is fair is by nature Good ".

   Video link :   https://youtu.be/vlxes7pkDiI

Words : 1732

   Reference: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Spenser

            

          https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/fqueen/section1/