The project aims at the analysis of the structure of story-telling within the paintings that exists on the walls of Ajanta Caves. These paintings depict the stories based on the lives of ‘Boddhisatvas’, famous fable known as ‘Jatakas’. The canvases of the paintings are the walls inside the ‘Viharas’ (residency and the prayer halls for the Buddhists monks) and the paintings take the huge walls of the caves as their canvas, without obvious frames or panels.
If one looks at the paintings for the first time, it would be very difficult to follow a particular direction and read those stories in sequence. However, if guided though, one gets the sequence of events correctly going from top-down, right-left, left-right & bottom-top. So, this project aims at determining how those paintings could be analyzed or read in a particular order and derives different forms of narrative within the frame of wall and still gets those Stories correctly.
As these paintings were done between 1st-6th centuries A.D., we tried to follow analogies and their narrative mapping into the contemporary graphical novels and comic books.