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Ellora Ajanta Festival in Aurangabad
Since 2002 Aurangabad's Ellora Ajanta Festival has been staged at Soneri Mahal, a seventeenth-century gold-leaf-painted palace, rather than at the Ellora caves it is named for. Organized by the Aurangabad Festival Committee with the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation, it mixes Kathak and Odissi dance, Hindustani music and Urdu mushaira poetry over three evenings, aiming to draw visitors toward the wider Ajanta-Ellora heritage circuit.
Since 2002 the Ellora Ajanta Festival has been staged not amid the Ellora caves themselves, where it began, but at Soneri Mahal, a seventeenth-century palace in Aurangabad built by the Orchha chieftain Pahadsing and named for the gold-leaf paintings that once covered its walls.