Bodhisattva Padmapani, Ajanta Cave 1 (fresco secco)

The Ajanta caves were 'rediscovered' in April 1819 by John Smith, an officer of the 28th Cavalry of the Madras Army, while tiger-hunting. Smith carved his name and the date on the wall of Cave 10 — the first act of modern defacement. The British Orientalist response that followed framed the caves within a discourse of lost Indian civilisation, with European scholarly mediation required to recover Indian heritage from Indian neglect. James Fergusson and James Burgess produced the first systematic documentation (1880); the Archaeological Survey of India under British direction undertook conservation.

Walter M. Spink's six-volume 'Ajanta: History and Development' (Brill, 2005–2014) established a new chronological framework for Ajanta that significantly narrowed the productive period to c. 462–480 CE under Vakataka Harishena — overturning the earlier British-established range of 4th–7th century. This revised dating restored Ajanta's place in the specific political and artistic context of Vakataka India rather than treating it as a diffuse 'golden age' phenomenon. Simultaneously, postcolonial critics (Partha Mitter, 'Much Maligned Monsters', 1977; Tapati Guha-Thakurta on Indian art historiography) interrogated the Orientalist frameworks that had shaped Ajanta's Western reception. The Padmapani specifically became a symbol in Indian cultural nationalism — reproduced widely as the exemplary image of classical Indian aesthetic achievement — which created new interpretive pressures distinct from but not free of the colonial discourse it critiques.