Ajanta

Ajanta
Author: Lachu Moorjani
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2009-09
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9781423613336

There are as many regional flavors and dishes in India as there are languages and dialects, and no one knows this better than Lachu Moorjani, owner of Ajanta Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area.Widely recognized as the Bay Area's premier restaurant for Indian cuisine, Ajanta sets the standard with its ever-changing menu, offering creative dishes from the many regions of India. Ajanta represents one of the best places to experience a taste of India without leaving the country!

Ajanta: The end of the Golden Age

Ajanta: The end of the Golden Age
Author: Walter M. Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004148329

Annotation. Volume Two begins with the contentious, yet challenging, views of Hans Bakker and Richard Cohen, both of whom are involved with an overview of Ajanta's development. This is explored further in shorter essays by Karl Khandalavala, Arvind Jamkhedkar, and Brahmanand Deshpande. At the same time, the author presents a detailed analysis of the form and development of Cave 26, as a model upon which his other arguments are built.

Ajanta: Painting, sculpture, architecture

Ajanta: Painting, sculpture, architecture
Author: Walter M. Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2005
Genre: Ajanta (India)
ISBN: 900414983X

Annotation. Volume Two begins with the contentious, yet challenging, views of Hans Bakker and Richard Cohen, both of whom are involved with an overview of Ajanta's development. This is explored further in shorter essays by Karl Khandalavala, Arvind Jamkhedkar, and Brahmanand Deshpande. At the same time, the author presents a detailed analysis of the form and development of Cave 26, as a model upon which his other arguments are built.

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 4 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Year by Year

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 4 Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Year by Year
Author: Walter Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047442113

Ajanta:Year by Year is planned as a biography of this remarkable site, starting with the earliest caves, dating from some two thousand years, to its startling renaissance in the brief period between approximately 462 and 480. Concentrating on the excavations of the later period, during the reign of the Vakataka emperor Harisena, it attempts to show how, after a surprising gap of some three hundred years, Ajanta’s proud and pious courtly patrons and its increasingly committed workmen created not only the greatest but the latest monument of India’s Golden Age. Nearly three hundred illustrations, in color and black and white, reveal the exuberant flowering of Ajanta and related Vakataka monuments, as well as the manner of their sudden demise.

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 7 Bagh, Dandin, Cells and Cell Doorways

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 7 Bagh, Dandin, Cells and Cell Doorways
Author: Walter Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2017-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004321926

Walter Spink’s intense concern with the development of the Ajanta caves and their architectural, sculptural and painted features finds its most insistent reflection in his present richly illustrated study. In part 1, Spink explains the many connections between the Bagh caves and its “sister site”, Ajanta. He particularly emphasizes the leading role that Bagh plays in establishing the “short chronology” and in the crucial matter of Buddhist shrine development from the aniconic to iconic forms of worship. In part 2, along with his colleague Professor Naomichi Yaguchi, who also provided the photographs and the newly informative plans, the authors show how, over the course of a mere decade, better and better ways were discovered to fit the doors in the cells where the monks lived. Such an analysis reveals the vigor of the conceptual and technical changes that characterize Ajanta’s evolution from its start in the early 460s to its traumatic collapse in about 470. Moving from Ajanta’s beginning to its ending, the evolution of door fittings parallels the precise and dramatic development of Indian history in the remarkable course of the emperor Harisena’s reign.

The Art of Ajanta and Sopoćani

The Art of Ajanta and Sopoćani
Author: Om Datt Upadhya
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9788120809901

Pauranic Prana-aesthetics, a finer shade different from that of vitalistic aesthetics )the earlier having breathing-rhythm of Ksaya-Vrddhi --diminuation and augmentation--other than the latter`s emphasis only on the rhythm of augmentation), has been delineated in this study with examples from the world`s two of the best art-monuments: Ajanta (India), now not remaining unknown even to the most casual connoisseur, and Sopocani (Yugoslavia), the most significant and monumentally beautiful work of Byzantine art. Tracing Prana-aesthetics as the aesthetics of inner-light coded in the creeper-motif by the artists of Ajanta, this work emphasises decoding of the creeper-motif by Byzantine artists culminating into the frescoes of Sopocani done in Hellenistic-Byzantine aesthetics beatifield by Hesycast meditation to which that of Buddhists was not unknown. Comparisons of various determinant aspects, aesthetics and artistic denominators, and constraints not allowing similar consummation are properly investigated to substantiate the thesis that Prana-aesthetics transfigures at Ajanta but transubstantiates at Sopocani. The significance of the anabolic aspects of this aesthetics is highlighted especially as a way out from the reductivistic tendencies of the present day visual-arts straining them upto the stage of catabolic dissolution.

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 2 Arguments about Ajanta

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 2 Arguments about Ajanta
Author: Walter Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2018-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047409353

Volume Two begins with writings by some of the most important critics of Walter Spink's conclusions, interspersed with his own responses, using a thorough analysis of the great Cave 26 to support his assertions. The author then turns to matters of patronage, and to the surprising fact that, unlike most other Buddhist sites, Ajanta was purely "elitist", developed by less than a dozen major patrons. Its brief heyday traumatically ended, however, with the death of the great emperor Harisena in about 477, creating political chaos. Ajanta's anxious patrons now joined in a headlong rush to get their shrines dedicated, in order to obtain the expected merit, before they fled the region, abandoning their caves to the monks and local devotees remaining at the now-doomed site. These "intrusive" new patrons now filled the caves with their own helter-skelter votive offerings, paying no heed to the well-laid plans of the years before. A similar pattern of patronage is to be found in the redecoration of the earlier Hinayana caves, where the careful planning of the work being done during Harisena's reign is suddenly interrupted by a host of individual votive donations. The volume ends with a new and useful editing of Ajanta inscriptions by Richard S. Cohen.

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 5 Cave by Cave

Ajanta: History and Development, Volume 5 Cave by Cave
Author: Walter Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2006-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047411870

Volume Five comprises, along with introductory comments, two "cave by cave" guides. One which, very briefly, describes the character of each cave and its patronage, is intended to be useful for the general visitor to the site. The other, very detailed, discusses the position and peculiarities of each cave in relation to the overall, year by year, development of the site. This volume also contains a complete set of cave plans, and various illuminating charts, graphs, outlines, and maps.

Ajanta: History and Development

Ajanta: History and Development
Author: Walter Spink
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2018-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 904741635X

The twenty-nine Buddhist caves near Ajanta form a devotional complex which ranks as one of the world's most startling achievements, created at the very apogee of India's Golden Age. Ajanta: History and Development, appears as part of the series Handbook of Oriental Studies, present the reader with a systematic treatment of all aspects of the site, the result of forty years of painstaking research in situ by Walter M. Spink. Volume one deals with the historical context in which this dramatic burst of pious activity took place under the reign of Vakataka emperor Harisena, (c. 460 – 477 A.D.), and with the sudden halt of activity almost immediately following the death of the emperor. In surprising detail the relative and absolute chronology of the site can be established from a careful reading of the physical evidence, with consequences for our dating of India’s Golden Age. Ajanta, it appears, is a veritable illustrated history of Harisena’s times, crowded with information on its history, development and how it was used. Originally published in hardcover

Ajanta’s Evolution: From Sāvakayāna to Bodhisatvayāna amid Hunnic Turmoil

Ajanta’s Evolution: From Sāvakayāna to Bodhisatvayāna amid Hunnic Turmoil
Author: Rajesh Kumar Singh
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-05-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1803277181

This book offers a new scholarly exploration of the rock-cut Ajanta Caves located in the modern-day Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India, their sculpture and paintings. The book meticulously traces the rise, transformation, and legacy of these architectural marvels from the late third century BC to around AD 480.