Place · Pratihara temples · India
Osian temples
The 15 Hindu and Jain temples of Osian at Jodhpur district, Rajasthan, in the Thar desert on the caravan route from Gujarat to Sindh, built between the 8th and 11th centuries under the Pratiharas. The Osian group is one of the earliest and best-preserved Nagara-style temple complexes in Rajasthan. The 8th-century Sachchiya Mata temple (the oldest surviving) and the 11th-century Mahavira Jain temple together document the Pratihara regional style and the mixed Hindu-Jain patronage of the caravan merchants whose trade through Osian funded the temples. The Oswal Jain community takes its name from Osian — the merchant lineage credited with the Jain temple's founding. The town's 1195 Ghurid raid damaged the complex; the Jain temple survives intact.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Patron dynasty
- Chandela
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.720, 72.910
Connections (2)
- Craft tradition ofOsian Mahavira
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.
- Site adjacencyLodurva
Lodurva and Osian are the two pre-Rajput-fort temple landscapes of the Marwar and Jaisalmer desert, both on the caravan road and both eighth to twelfth century. What they show is that the Thar had monumental architecture and Jain mercantile endowment three centuries before the great forts, and that both were built on transit revenue rather than on agriculture.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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