Place · Jain temple & frescoes · Pakistan
Gori Temple, Nagarparkar
A Shvetambara Jain temple of Gori Parshvanath in the Tharparkar desert, its inscription dated 1375–76. Fifty-two subsidiary shrines ring the main cell, and the dome and corridor carry painted figural cycles that are among the oldest surviving Jain wall paintings anywhere in the subcontinent — Jain painting is otherwise known mainly from manuscripts of this period. The community that maintained it had largely left Tharparkar by 1947, and the temple now stands empty in the sand with its paint still on the plaster.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.638, 70.618
Worth knowing
Jain art of the fourteenth century survives mostly as palm-leaf and paper manuscript painting; here the same idiom is on a ceiling, in a desert village, because nobody came back to whitewash it.
Connections (3)
- Pitha network withGirnār Neminath temples
Gori Parshvanāth in the Tharparkar desert and the Neminath temples on Girnār belong to the same Shvetāmbara world, and the same patronage: Gujarati and Marwari merchant money building in stone at the western edge of the subcontinent through the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Gori's inscription dates it to 1375–76, within the span of the Girnār rebuilding. The difference is what happened afterwards. Girnār kept its congregation and its whitewash; Tharparkar's Jains had mostly left by 1947, and Gori kept its fourteenth-century paint instead.
- AnalogueDilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū
Both are Shvetāmbara temples in the arid west, both ring a main shrine with fifty-two subsidiary cells, and both are famous for a surface. At Dilwāra on Mount Ābū it is the marble, carved to translucency on the ceilings and the dome. At Gori it is paint: figural cycles on the dome and corridor vaults that are among the oldest surviving Jain wall paintings anywhere, since fourteenth-century Jain painting is otherwise known almost entirely from palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. Dilwāra survived by being maintained, Gori by being abandoned.
- Site adjacencyKaroonjhar Mountains
The temples are where they are because the granite is. Karoonjhar is the only rock in the Pakistani Thar and therefore the only place in it that holds surface water, shedding monsoon runoff into pools instead of letting it sink into sand. That is what allowed a settled Jain merchant community at Nagarparkar to build and maintain stone temples in a desert, and what gathers the Churrio Jabal Durga Mata shrine and the Rana Rajput forts around the same outcrop. Quarrying the granite commercially is now locally contested for exactly this reason.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gori Temple, Nagarparkar”. Pakistan UNESCO tentative list submission for the Nagarparkar cultural landscape (2016); Sindh antiquities records.
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