Barun Roy: If Ajanta were to be Angkor

ASIA FILE

While the government talks big about tourist revenues, this world heritage site has been left in a sorry state of neglect.

If India is serious in pursuing a future in tourism, as the authorities suggest, and expects its annual pickings of tourist dollars to surpass $12 billion by 2012 "" when China would be aiming for $55 billion "" it must shed its local-trader attitude, happy with its local clientele, and run a global business based on global standards of service and efficiency. Dollars won't come to us simply through the act of wishing. We must prove our worth to earn them.

We seem unable to grasp this simple truth. I wrote in these columns earlier about the sorry state of the Sun Temple of Konarak. And now a visit to the Buddhist caves of Ajanta reinforces the suspicion that the deficiency might in fact be genetic. Here we have a world heritage site, of great cultural importance to both India and the world, and it's treated like a local tourist attraction, where amenities are few and ordinary, even crude, like stinking loos and chairs borne by humans to transport the elderly.

True to the accepted tradition of Indian tourism, there's not even a visitor centre, where people could prepare for the trip, get information, ask questions, and have answers. Except for a difficult-to-read billboard put up at the site, which most people tend to overlook anyway, there's no way of knowing what the caves are about, why, when and how were they built, and why their murals are so significant in the annals of Indian art. No literature is available either at the bus station, where people board pollution-free buses to go to the caves, or at the tiny hole of a window where one buys tickets to enter them. Of course, one can buy badly written and produced brochures, for whatever one can haggle the price down to, from private vendors as insistent as temple pandas, or hire guides to be led from cave to cave and fed small capsules of instant history; but that's not the point.

Most visitors have only a vague idea of what Ajanta is and wander like lost souls, not knowing where to look and what to look for. The confusion gets worse as they enter the caves where fragments of paintings still exist. The immediate experience is of total darkness. As the eyes get settled, one sees a faint spread of light coming from low-watt halogen bulbs focussed from below. The dimness, of course, is meant to protect the 1,500-year-old frescoes, but what about visitors? All they see are uncertain blurs of colour on the walls and don't know what to make of them. Even better known images, like the Bodhisattvas Padmapani and Vajrapani, aren't easy to locate and decipher. The use of special light beams, obtained for a fee, doesn't help much either. They reveal little.

Visitors deserve a better deal. Why were the caves restored in the first place if they are to be kept in a veil of darkness? Why were the paintings cleansed of the soot of centuries if they are not to be properly seen and enjoyed? Surely, a better way can be found to light up the caves without causing any damage, if only the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) would leave aside its ego and consult experts other than theirs alone. A world heritage must have world-class amenities, upkeep, presentation, and visitor management. Why can't we have even simple things like headphones that one can put on to get a running commentary?

Another thing. Much of Ajanta's treasure has been lost already and the little that's left is in danger. Water seeping through cracks in the rocks is damaging the cave walls and ASI's use of cement to repair them is only spreading the damp to larger areas. Also, there's reason to suspect that ASI may have removed the sheen from the frescoes by going about its own way to clean up the heavy soot deposits, and crude is the only adjective that comes to mind to describe its repairs on some of the paintings. There must be an immediate pooling of international expertise to make sure Ajanta isn't further denuded of the very reason why one would like to visit the place, its frescoes.

We've got to remember this: Nearly 2 million foreign tourists visited Xian's Terracotta Warriors last year, while 1.1 million visited Angkor Wat, and the numbers are rising. How many came to Ajanta? Hardly 20,000. Only a blockhead will fail to understand that a lot of hard work must be put in if Ajanta "" along with Ellora and other heritage sites "" has to have, as the authorities expect, a role in shaping India's future in tourism, and that should include plans to develop the nearby village of Ajintha as a kind of a cultural Siem Reap, with superior dining, lodging, shopping and entertainment facilities.