Murals around Ajantao Grottoes

Ajanta's most precious cultural heritage is murals, whose quality and quantity are incomparable with other murals in the Indian subcontinent. These murals vividly reproduce the court life of Gupta dynasty. The Gupta dynasty began about 320 years ago and was ruled by Chandra Gupta I, one of the princes of East India. At the end of the 4th century, the dynasty became a great empire that ruled from northern India to Deccan Plateau. The most complete preserved Ajanta murals are caves 1, 2, 16 and 17, all of which are monasteries. There is no space between the murals, but they are connected and tell many stories. Its technology is to mix cow dung, clay, stone and rice powder into slurry and brush it on the wall, and then coat it with a thin layer of green soil. Next, draw a shallow base map, and then color it with a mixture of resin and glue. Dark and white highlights. Finally, paint varnish on the picture and fix it. However, with the passage of time, murals in many places have fallen off. Gupta painting in the classical period is characterized by its depiction of human sexuality. This is particularly prominent in the scenes of court life. The human body in the later murals was exaggerated and elongated, and the movements were clumsy, and the folds on the clothes disappeared. These murals are closely combined with characters and scenes, with compact composition and full of vitality. No wonder Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, praised Ajanta's murals as "simply bringing people back to the dream world of the past".