Consider the following statements about Ajanta Cave paintings: 1. The paintings depict yakshas, gandharvas and apsaras. 2. The artists have used the technique of providing "multiple perspectives". Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

Correct — C, Both 1 and 2. Take the two claims separately. The population of the Ajanta walls is not confined to the Buddha and the Jataka stories: alongside kings, monks, merchants and forest scenes, the murals and the carved surfaces carry the whole celestial cast of Indian art — apsaras, gandharva couples flying with their instruments and garlands, and yakshas standing guard. NCERT's own art textbook reproduces a painted figure with the caption 'Apsara, Cave No. 17, Ajanta', and the Archaeological Survey's descriptions of the caves record yaksha door-guardians and flying couples in the carved work, so statement 1 is safe. Statement 2 describes how the space in those paintings is built. Ajanta's painters did not work to one fixed vanishing point in the European manner. A building, a throne or a group of figures is set down as if seen from more than one station at once, so that a roof, a floor and a side wall can all be visible together, and events separated in place or in time are placed in one continuous field, divided by architectural bands rather than by distance. That habit of combining viewpoints in a single picture is what the phrase 'multiple perspectives' names, and it is the standard description of Ajanta's picture space; NCERT uses the sister term 'tilted perspective' for the same device in the Bharhut narrative panels.

• (a)1 only — Accepts the celestial figures but rejects the treatment of space. Ajanta is famous exactly for a pictorial space that refuses a single fixed viewpoint, so there is no reason to strike statement 2.
• (b)2 only — Denies the easiest of the two claims. Apsaras, gandharvas and yakshas are among the best-known figures at the site, and NCERT prints an Ajanta apsara as an illustration in the very chapter this question is drawn from.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Would require Ajanta to have neither celestial figures nor a distinctive handling of space, which is the opposite of what the caves are known for.

Ajanta, in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district of Maharashtra, is the only surviving body of early Indian painting on this scale. Work falls into two long phases — an early Satavahana-period group of about the first century BCE, of which Caves 9 and 10 keep paintings, and a later fifth-century CE group associated with Vakataka patronage, of which Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 keep the best-preserved murals. The subjects are the life of the Buddha, the Jatakas and the Avadanas, with Padmapani and Vajrapani in Cave 1 the most reproduced single images.

Both statements are the sort a candidate can settle without having memorised anything about Ajanta specifically. If you can picture any Ajanta reproduction, you have seen the flying celestial couples and the ornamented female figures the first statement names. The second is a claim about method, and the way to test it is to ask whether Indian mural painting of this period uses one-point perspective; it does not, and cannot, since the convention was developed in fifteenth-century Italy. What Indian painters use instead is exactly the combination of viewpoints the statement describes. NCERT's chapter records the related technical vocabulary — outward projections in the fifth-century paintings, sharply defined rhythmic lines, body colour merging with the outer line to create volume, and figures arranged in a circular form in Caves 1 and 2 'to create three-dimensionality and the special effects'.

• Ajanta's paintings survive in two phases — Caves 9 and 10 from about the first century BCE, and Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17 from the fifth century CE.
• The themes are the life of the Buddha, the Jatakas and the Avadanas; Simhala Avadana, Mahajanaka Jataka and Vidhurapandita Jataka each cover a whole wall.
• NCERT's Class 11 Fine Art chapter reproduces a painted figure captioned 'Apsara, Cave No. 17, Ajanta'.
• Events set in different places are grouped in one picture field and separated by outward architectural bands rather than by depth.
• Different skin colours — brown, yellowish brown, greenish, yellow ochre — are used across the figures, which NCERT reads as representing a multi-coloured population.

• Assuming that because the caves are Buddhist the paintings can carry no yakshas, gandharvas or apsaras; those figures belong to the shared Indian repertoire and appear throughout.
• Reading 'multiple perspectives' as a claim about differing scholarly opinions rather than about the handling of space in the picture.
• Mixing up the Ajanta phases and giving the fifth-century murals of Cave 1 to the first-century BCE group in Caves 9 and 10.

As a two-statement item on themes and technique, as a matching item pairing a painting with its cave number, or as a single-line question on which other site preserves Gupta-period painting.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The famous paintings of Padmapani and Vajrapani are found in which cave at Ajanta?

  • (a)Cave No. 1
  • (b)Cave No. 9
  • (c)Cave No. 17
  • (d)Cave No. 26

  Answer(a) Cave No. 1 — images of Padmapani and Vajrapani are common across Ajanta, but the best-preserved paintings of the pair are in Cave 1.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The themes of the Ajanta murals are drawn mainly from which of the following?

  • (a)The Ramayana and the Mahabharata
  • (b)The life of the Buddha, the Jatakas and the Avadanas
  • (c)Jain Tirthankara legends
  • (d)Puranic accounts of Vishnu's incarnations

  Answer(b) The life of the Buddha, the Jatakas and the Avadanas — these supply almost the whole narrative programme of the caves.