December 31, 2020
Ajanta cave painting Maha-janaka Jataka, Cave 1 Dancer with musicians.
Pinterest
Featuring elephants, elaborate headdresses, finely wrought jewellery, flowers, jars of wine (or perhaps water), buxom women playing musical instruments, helmeted foreigners and religious symbols, the ancient Buddhist art of the Ajanta Caves in western India is considered a supremely beautiful historical record dating from as early as two millennia ago.
Now, an image of a detail from one of the murals has been deposited in an underground archive, in a decommissioned coal mine deep in an Arctic mountain on an island off the northern coast of Norway.
Originally photographed by Indian art historian Benoy Behl in the early 1990s using lowlight photography techniques he developed for the work, the image is of King Mahajanaka seen renouncing worldly pleasures in one of the elaborate Ajanta murals.
Shutterstock
Longyearbyen, located on the west coast of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, is cold. It always is: The annual average temperature there is -5˚C, but between January and March that average drops to -13˚C. In July, by contrast, you can expect an almost tropical 7˚C. It has a population of under 3,000 people, a single-screen cinema that plays films on Wednesdays and Sundays, and a school whose 270 students show up for their first day in August in mittens and hats. When school trips head into the mountains, teachers carry rifles to account for the risk of polar bears.