From Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar with Love: Encountering Ancient Caves in India
August 2026
Dear Reader,
It’s rather interesting to visit a city that has recently been renamed, because you may land at the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar Maharaj Airport. But on the lips of the man at the hotel desk, or my tour guide, it is still Aurangabad (originally named in 1653 by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb as his capital). Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar was renamed, after decades of political contest, after a Maratha prince. I, however, arrived with no intention to unpack this particular puzzle. Like most who visit this nominal limbo, I was here to visit the Ajanta and Ellora caves.
Ajanta is two hours out. Ellora, an hour and a half in the other way. Visiting either is a commitment; to the distance, to the heat, to a full day of walking. Unless you are better planned than me, in which case you go during the winter, or the monsoon, when the cliffs turn into waterfalls. There was a lingering anticipation on our long drive through the Maharashtra heat. I had spent most of it trying to wrap my head around how old these caves really are; I mean so old that till this day we cannot figure out how they would have been built. Ajanta is made up of thirty Buddhist caves cut into a horseshoe of basalt cliff, with walls painted from the second century B.C.E. onwards. Ellora, cut from a different cliff face entirely, holds Buddhist, Hindu and Jain (an ancient Indian religion focused on spiritual purity, nonviolence, and breaking the cycle of rebirth to reach liberation) caves within walking distance of each other, monuments to three religions sharing the same rock without apparent argument.
At Ajanta, what arrests you is the fragility. The paintings are peeling, and pigment is lifting from rock the way old wallpaper lifts from a wall. Something about looking at paint falling off a wall that has survived this long felt less like decay and more like the stone is breathing. As I stood there admiring these murals, I had just understood how far back our consciousness as a human race spans.
At Ellora, which is better known for its sculptures, a figure stopped me. She emerges from the rock wall—multi-armed, mid-motion, adorned rather than armoured—and something in the way she holds herself, simultaneously ferocious and completely at ease, that I found difficult to walk away from. I have studied enough art history to know how rarely the female form in ancient religious iconography gets to be both divinely powerful and soft. She is not softened for anyone's comfort. At the risk of sounding saccharine, her arms looked as though they had always been moving and I simply arrived at the wrong moment to see her still. I stood there for longer than I meant to.
However, Ellora’s carvings are not all that caught my attention. There is a different kind of mark-making in the sleeping chambers made for the monks at Ajanta (closed to most tourists) wherever archaeologists took samples of rock to examine, they left something behind: a small hollow in the stone, and inside it, a rolled piece of paper bearing a name, a date, a purpose. Dozens of explorers, scientists and archaeologists were mapped on the raw walls. The gesture is unexpectedly tender. It makes the caves feel less like a monument and more like a correspondence; something still being written, across centuries, by people who couldn't help wanting to be part of it.
What no one tells you about Ajanta and Ellora, what I don't think can be told, only experienced, is how physical the encounter is. There is a reason Ajanta was built the way it was, for people who had decided to sit very still inside rock for long periods of time and see what happened. I found myself understanding that instinct with unexpected clarity while walking through it. Somewhere between one cave and the next, without quite deciding to, I slowed down. I wanted, genuinely, to sit down on the stone floor and stay. The caves were designed for exactly this feeling, two thousand years ago. Apparently they still work. The walk between caves is expectantly long and hot and your feet ache by midday. The interiors are cool in a way that feels almost divine after being in the sun outside, a great phenomenon which is most likely engineered ventilation. And your eyes are constantly adjusting, finding things in the dark, losing them again. The caves demand something from your body as well as your attention, and by the end of the day you feel a particular kind of exhaustion that is not unpleasant, the exhaustion of having genuinely looked at something rather than simply seen it.
On the drive back, I kept thinking about the city waiting at the end of the road with its two names, its contested identity, its argument about which history belongs to it. The caves, it occurred to me, have no such problem. They have held Buddhist monks and Hindu gods and Jain saints in adjacent rooms for over a millennium. They have been named and renamed and forgotten and rediscovered. They have watched empires come and go with the kind of patience only things that were carved from the earth itself could have.
The city at the end of this road is still figuring out its name. I suppose some things take longer than others. Age is the price of wisdom, or so they say. The caves have simply paid more of it.
Sincerely,
A Young Traveller