The lost stupa of Amaravati
A lesser-known school of Indian art which influenced India, Sri Lanka and South East Asia
One of the most striking exhibits in the ‘Ancient India, Living Traditions’ exhibition at the British Museum last October was a collection of carved limestone panels.
After I had finished with the main exhibition, I went to the India section of the museum. At the far end of the hall there was huge glass screen which formed a protected room, and inside that room, I could see through the glass, were many more of these same panels.
What were they, and why were so many of them here?
I knew about the existence of these carvings; every book on Indian art tells you about the great stupas1 of Sanchi and Amaravati, built between the third/second century BCE and the second century CE, in Andhara Pradesh, South India. The stupa at Sanchi is well preserved, and has incredible carvings.
The stupa at Amaravati, however, has completely collapsed. No-one alive today ever saw this stupa in its original form. The history of its demise and excavation is a sorry tale of neglect, ignorance and colonial appropriation.
Many aspects of the stupa’s history, and even its size, are contested. It’s not clear who first discovered it in 1797, either Major Colin MacKenzie, or Raja Vesireddy Nayudu, a local landlord who was looking for building materials. Either way, the Raja helped himself to the bricks he found underneath the soil covering the stupa for his building projects. When Mackenzie came back in 1816 as the Surveyor General, the dome of the stupa had been destroyed and the centre of the mound was being turned into a reservoir.
What followed seems to have been a haphazard series of excavations and surveys over the next hundred or so years, which saw pieces of sculpture from the stupa being sent all over the world. They were moved around India by the British, with records from 1854 showing that some sculptures were lost, before in 1859 a hundred and twenty of them were shipped to London.
Unfortunately the museum they were supposed to go to in London closed down after the abolition of the East India Company in 1857, and the sculptures spent a year being stored at Beales’s Wharf in Southwark. When they were moved from there, there was still nowhere to house them, and so they were stored in a coach house, with some being left outside. When James Fergusson rediscovered them in 1897, the dust in the coach house and the polluted air outside had caused serious damage.2
A piece bought by the British Museum in 1860 ended up in the back yard of a barber’s shop in Great Marlborough Street. The sculptures were finally permanently housed in the British Museum in 1880, though it wasn’t until 1992 that the Asahi Shimbun gallery which houses them today was opened.
Though there are no photographs or drawings of the stupa, there are a number of images of it on the carved panels that survive. Over the centuries scholars have attempted to use these images to create drawings, and later models, of what they thought the stupa must have looked like.
The Great Shrine of Amaravati, founded around 200 BC in what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh in the south-east, was one of the oldest, largest and most important Buddhist monuments in ancient India. The shrine, with its solid, domed structure, was a stupa and probably contained a relic – perhaps of a famous teacher. Devotees honoured the enshrined relic by walking around the stupa in a clockwise direction. While doing so, they could also benefit by viewing scenes from the Life of the Buddha sculpted on the railing that surrounded the walkway. Some devotees gave money for the decoration of the stupa and these gifts are recorded in inscriptions.
The main stupa was surrounded by a number of smaller stupas, and was the central feature of a large monastery and monastic complex.3 It consisted of a rubble-filled mound, with a brick casing at its base forming a cylindrical ‘drum’, which was then covered with carved limestone slabs. Above this was a dome which was finished with a mixture of plaster and more carved limestone pieces. The whole thing was surrounded by a railing which had gateways projecting outwards at the four cardinal points.
As this slightly weird animation mentions, many of the carved slabs are carved on both sides, as the stupa was added to over a few hundred years.
The carvings, even in their damaged state, are exquisite, and exquisitely detailed. I didn’t know that the ‘Amaravati School’ is regarded to be one of three major styles or schools of ancient India, the other two being Mathura and Gandhara, and is credited with having a major influence on the development of art in South India, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, including the paintings in the caves of Ajanta.
Most of the sources I’ve been consulting, if they mention the detail of the sculptures at all, seem to be mainly interested in identifying which Jataka story (a collection of stories of the Buddha’s life, and previous lives) is represented in each scene. They want to know, dammit! They want to be able to identify everything, so that they can say that they understand; that we are in possession of knowledge about what Amaravati was. Gloriously, many of the scenes defy easy recognition, and because the excavations were done so carelessly and haphazardly, it's impossible to tell what order they might have been placed in.
In my next piece I’ll be looking closely at some of these carvings; not in terms of identifying the stories they represent, but at the composition, the figures, the jewellery, the musical instruments - everything that makes these scenes so extraordinary.
I’ll also be attempting to say a little about the perspective of one of the most recent publications about this site, Jas Elsner’s ‘Amaravati’, published in 2024. The book attempts to piece together many of the contextual and philosophical strands that surround the stupa, suggesting how it was designed to educate and affect people in terms of their direct experience of the Buddha’s teachings.
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A stupa is a ‘reliquary mound’, build over the relics of a reknowned saint or person
Akira Shimada, 2016, ‘Discovery of the Amaravati Stupa: Early Excavations and Interpretations’, Amaravati: The Art of an Early Buddhist Monument in Context, British Museum, London
Elsner, J., 2024, Amaravati, Reaktion Books, London
Utterly fascinating & timelessly beautiful. Excellent post.🙏✨
I have been fascinated by Amravati ever since I read about its obscure ruins in school history books. What a fascinating collection of stories and photos these are! Beautifully immersive!