Acclaim in Aurangabad

Onwards to Aurangabad, a city of over a million people, 45 minutes flight from Mumbai, where we had the pleasure of a seven hour layover. We met a fellow frequent flyer in the airport who could have made it quicker under their own steam.

Aurangabad is best known for the Ellora and Ajanta caves which most people have never heard of  and aren’t even caves in the first place. You might with some justification wonder, then, why on earth I asked the tour company to add this to our itinerary and endure seven happy hours in Mumbai airport. Well, 20 years ago on a teaching trip to Mumbai our group was taken here and I was blown away. 

Take a solid rock cliff and either, start chiselling on the face of the cliff (carving in), or (far more difficult), start chiselling at the top of the cliff, some distance in from the edge (carving down). The first piece of stone you shape at the surface will eventually become the topmost part of your structure. A little like the medieval cathedrals of Europe, these temples (as they were to become) were multigenerational acts of devotion and worship. Different continents, same driving forces.

First some carve in temples:  (remember all the spaces you see were once solid rock). Interestingly, there are Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples - all in close proximity, having been constructed/excavated around the 1400-1600s. Shades of ‘ebony and ivory living together in perfect harmony, side by side on…’ oh you know the rest.

Even Buddhist monks like a souvenir!

All these were amazing, but nothing really prepares you for the scale of the largest rock temple in the world (a cut down temple)

And you can walk through buildings:

Here’s the back of a 20 rupee note (25cents):

It looked strangely familiar:

Then onto another strangely familiar building in Aurangabad “The Taj of the Deccan”

This one looked great from a distance, but like a fading Hollywood star, needed some work.

Oh and the acclaim part? Sue and I were probably asked at least 60 times for a photo with Indian people. Good looks or a simple lack of Caucasians post covid? I’ll let you decide. We were happy to oblige.