Place · Pratihara Jain temple · India
Osian Mahavira
Also known as Jodhpur, Mahavira, Mahavira / Sachchiya Mata, Osian, Osian, Jodhpur, Sachchiya Mata
The 8-9th century Pratihara-period Mahavira Jain temple at Osian in Jodhpur district, Rajasthan, 65 kilometres from Jodhpur — one of the oldest surviving Jain temples in western India. The temple's foundation is 783 CE (dated by inscription) under the Pratihara king Vatsaraja. The structure is in the Nagara Jain style with distinctive dancing figures, mithuna couples, and Jain iconographic reliefs on the exterior walls. The Oswal Jain merchant community of Rajasthan takes its name from Osian — the merchant lineage credited with the Jain temple's founding. The 1195 Ghurid Muslim raid damaged the complex; the Jain temple survived intact. The adjacent 15 Hindu Pratihara-period temples at Osian document the Pratihara regional style and the mixed Hindu-Jain patronage of the caravan merchants whose trade through Osian funded the temples. ASI protection since 1917.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.717, 72.917
Connections (3)
- Contemporary capital withKhajuraho
Osian's Mahāvīra temple of about 783 stands among Hindu temples of the same decades and the same Pratihāra masons, as Khajurāho's eastern Jain group would two centuries later among Chandela ones. In both places the Jain and Hindu buildings differ only in what is installed inside them. Osian's Mahāvīra temple of about 783 is among the earliest surviving Jain temples anywhere in India, and the Oswal merchant community traces its own conversion to this village.
- Companion in the same setNakoda Parshvanatha, Barmer
Osian and Nākodā are the two great Marwar tirthas, and both are as much community institutions as temples: Osian is where the Oswal merchant caste traces its conversion, and Nākodā's Bhairava is petitioned about lawsuits and loans by the same merchant families' descendants. Nākodā Bhairava is a vyavahāric deity, petitioned about worldly matters that Jain doctrine makes no provision for, which is the clearest case of a tirtha keeping a functionary its theology does not allow.
- Craft tradition ofOsian temples
Osian's temples were paid for by the merchant communities of the Marwar caravan route, and the Oswal Jains — one of the largest trading castes of western India — take their name from the town and the Mahavira temple there as their origin shrine. The pattern repeats across western India: the road, the merchant community, the temple and the caste name are one thing, and the architecture is the record of a trading network rather than of a dynasty.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jodhpur”. Jain tīrtha guides and the Digambara and Śvetāmbara temple trusts’ own records.
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