The painting of ‘Bodhisattva Padmapani’ is located at

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Correct — C, Ajanta. The Padmapani is painted on the rear-aisle wall of Cave 1 at Ajanta, on the left of the doorway that leads into the Buddha shrine; the matching over-lifesize figure of the Bodhisattva Vajrapani, holding the thunderbolt, stands on the right of the same doorway. The two are, by common consent, the most famous individual painted images at the site, and they belong to Ajanta's second building phase, the Vakataka work of roughly 460 to 480 CE carried out in the reign of Harishena, who ruled from 460 until his death in 477. Walter Spink, whose chronology of the caves is now the standard one, attributes Cave 1 to Harishena's own patronage, and reads the cave's choice of Jataka scenes — those telling of the Buddha's former lives as a king rather than as an animal — as fitting a royal donor. The figure itself is unmistakable once described: a tall, gently swaying bodhisattva, eyes lowered, wearing a jewelled crown and a pearl string across the chest, holding a blue lotus in the right hand. Padmapani means 'the lotus-bearer', and the lotus is the attribute by which the Mahayana identifies Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Technically the work is not true fresco: the Ajanta painters laid a gritty mud plaster on the rock, primed it with lime, and painted on the dried surface, which is why the murals are described as dry fresco. Cave 1, along with Caves 2, 16 and 17, carries the largest surviving body of ancient Indian wall painting anywhere. The caves — thirty of them, cut into the northern wall of a horseshoe gorge of the Waghur river in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra — have been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1983.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The one genuinely dangerous option, because Bagh is the other great surviving set of murals of the same age. Nine rock-cut monuments were cut into a sandstone face above the Baghani stream in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, of which five survive; Cave 4 is known as the Rang Mahal, the palace of colours, and the paintings were executed in tempera over a reddish-brown mud plaster with a lime priming, exactly as at Ajanta. But no Padmapani is among them, and since 1982 most of the surviving Bagh paintings have not even been at Bagh — they were detached for preservation and are displayed at the Gujari Mahal Archaeological Museum in Gwalior.  (b) Confused with Ajanta constantly, because the two sites lie about a hundred kilometres apart in the same district and are usually taught in the same breath. Ellora is later — its thirty-four open caves run from about 600 to 1000 CE — and it is above all a site of sculpture and architecture, with twelve Buddhist caves, seventeen Hindu and five Jain, crowned by Cave 16, the Kailasa temple, the largest monolithic rock excavation in the world. Ellora does preserve painted fragments, but they are post-Gupta, much decayed, and do not include the Padmapani.  (d) Also a real cave site with real paintings, which is what makes it a usable distractor. The four cave temples at Badami — ancient Vatapi, the early Chalukya capital in Bagalkot district, Karnataka — include Cave 3, dated precisely by Mangalesha's old-Kannada inscription to the Shaka year 500, that is 578 or 579 CE, and preserving some of the earliest surviving coloured painting in Karnataka. But Badami's caves are Hindu, with Cave 4 given over to Jain figures, and their painted and carved subjects are Shaiva, Vaishnava and courtly. A Mahayana bodhisattva guarding a Buddha shrine does not belong there.

Concept: Padmapani is not a separate deity but a form of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion and the most widely worshipped figure of Mahayana Buddhism, identified by the padma or lotus he carries. A bodhisattva, in Mahayana doctrine, is one who has earned nirvana but postpones it in order to help all beings across, which is why bodhisattva images multiply exactly as Mahayana devotionalism takes hold — and why they appear at Ajanta only in the later, fifth-century caves and not in the first, Satavahana-period group. The pairing at Cave 1 is deliberate and doctrinal: Padmapani, compassion, on one side of the shrine door, and Vajrapani, the holder of the thunderbolt and emblem of power, on the other, the two together flanking the Buddha within. Ajanta itself divides cleanly into two campaigns separated by more than three centuries. The earliest caves — 9, 10, 12, 13 and 15A — belong to about 100 BCE to 100 CE under Satavahana patronage, and consist of chaitya-grihas with stupas and plain viharas, with almost no figurative sculpture. The whole of the rest of the site is Vakataka work of the late fifth century, and it is that second campaign which produced the celebrated painting. Excavation stopped abruptly: Spink's reading is that after Harishena's death in 477 the great patrons withdrew, minor donors squeezed small 'intrusive' shrines and images into gaps for a few years, and after about 480 not a single new image was made at the site.

State PCS 2023 Q67 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q67 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer