Journey
Jain monuments
Jain building is unlike Hindu building in what it spends on. There is rarely a great tower; the money goes into interiors — ceilings, pillars, the multiplication of identical cells — and it is usually merchant or ministerial money rather than a king's. Dilwara's ceilings and Ranakpur's fourteen hundred and forty-four pillars, no two of them carved alike, are what that spending looks like, and both were paid for by ministers rather than by rulers.
Stops (10)
- Dilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū · Dilwāra — the translucent ceiling
Five marble temples on Mount Ābū. The Vimala Vasahi of 1031 and the Luna Vasahi of 1230 are the high point: lotus ceilings cut until the stone passes light, and forty-eight pillars no two alike. Marble was hauled up from Arāsūrī, and the carvers were reportedly paid by the weight of dust removed.
- Gori Temple, Nagarparkar · 1375–76, and then nobody
The one Jain monument on this list whose interior survives as paint rather than carving. Gori Parshvanāth in the Tharparkar desert follows the familiar scheme — fifty-two identical cells ringing a main shrine — but its dome and corridor vaults carry figural cycles that are among the oldest surviving Jain wall paintings in the subcontinent. Fourteenth-century Jain painting is otherwise known almost entirely from palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. Dilwāra survived by being maintained; this survived by being abandoned, and never whitewashed.
- Ranakpur · Ranakpur — fourteen hundred and forty-four pillars
A fifteenth-century Chaumukha temple in a Pāli valley, open on four sides to a four-faced Ādinātha, with 1,444 pillars none of which repeats and none of which blocks the sight of the image from anywhere in the building. Dharanā Shāh, a minister of Mewar, paid for it over about fifty years.
- Tāraṅga Jain temple · Kumbhāriā and Tāranga — the Solanki marble
Solanki-period Jain temples in north Gujarat, contemporary with Modherā's sun temple and by the same tradition of masons. Kumbhāriā's five temples stand almost unvisited beside the Ambājī pilgrimage; Tāranga's Ajitnātha is Kumārapāla's, thirty metres high and severe where Dilwāra is lavish.
- Khajuraho Jain group · Khajurāho — the eastern group
Pārśvanātha, Ādinātha and Śāntinātha, built in the same decades and the same nāgara style as the Chandela Hindu temples a kilometre west, under the same patronage. Only the images inside distinguish them, which is the most instructive fact about the site and the one least often mentioned.
- Ellorā · Ellorā and Gwalior — Jain work in rock
The Indra Sabhā group at Ellorā, cut in the ninth century after the Buddhist and Hindu caves, and the Gwalior cliff colossi — dozens of Tīrthankaras carved into the fort's rock faces in the fifteenth century and defaced by Babur's men in 1527. Rock-cut Jainism at its start and at its end.
- Mūḍabidri · Mūdabidri and Kārkala — the Tulu coast
Thousand-pillar basadis with tiered timber roofs built for monsoon rather than for sun, and monolithic Bahubali colossi at Kārkala and Vēnūr copying Shravanabelagola. The Tulu country is where Jainism held political power longest in India, and its architecture is unlike Jain building anywhere else.
- Shatrunjaya / Pālitānā · Śatruñjaya — a city of temples with no citizens
Nine walled enclosures and about nine hundred temples on one hill, accumulated over eight centuries by Gujarati merchant families each adding their own. Nobody sleeps on the summit. It is the largest concentration of religious building on any hill anywhere and it empties every evening.
- Shravanabelagola · Shravanabelagola — carved from the hill itself
The Gommateśvara of about 981: seventeen metres of Bahubali standing free on Vindhyagiri, cut from the granite of the hill rather than assembled on it, with anthills and creepers carved climbing his legs to show how long he has stood still. Anointed every twelve years.
- Gopāchal Jain colossi, Gwalior · Gopāchal — the colossi in the cliff
Something over a hundred tirthankara figures cut into the cliffs of Gwalior fort between the seventh and fifteenth centuries under the Tomaras, the largest a seated Parshvanatha some ten metres high — the biggest body of rock-cut Jain sculpture anywhere. Babur ordered the images defaced in 1527 and most have been repaired in visible cement since.