The historical Buddha would not have recognised the Buddhism being practised in northwest India in 100 CE, about 500 years after his death. The same also applies to the Jainism practised in western India in 1000 CE, almost one-and-a-half thousand years after the death of the historical Mahavira – a religion of temples and rituals, where merchant princes commanded armies, and where idols of tirthankaras were lustrated with scented fluids. Once a religion of wandering ascetics with small lay communities, Jainism, by the medieval period, had become one of the great forces of western India. But how had this come to be?
Innovation and contestation
“There can be no doubt,” writes Jainism scholar Paul Dundas in The Jains (2002, page 201), “that the image cult represents one of the major historical continuities in Jain civilisation.”
Of course, while many Jains today do not worship idols, they are mentioned in inscriptions from as early as the 1stcentury BCE; to this day, some Jain communities conduct spectacular rituals such as the mahamastakabhisheka.The Jain approach to puja—the ritual where food and flowers are offered to a deity—is, however, somewhat different from that followed by Hinduism. As anthropologist Lawrence Babb notes in the edited volume Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History (1998), Jain puja is not strictly “giving to” a deity but rather “giving up”, “an opportunity for the layperson to engage for a discrete time in the renunciatory activity of the true ascetic.”
This is a small, but significant, difference. Early Jains seem to have grasped the growing importance of image veneration; by offering a focus on religious activity, images were potent conduits for building religious communities. A related development was temple worship, which allowed communities to worship, concentrate resources, and stake claims to political authority. From as early as the 4th century CE, Jain monks in Gujarat were attaching themselves to temples (Dundas 2002, 136). Here they could interact directly with lay followers, involve themselves in rituals, and mobilise funds. This was controversial: According to Jain doctrines, monks were meant to wander from place to place without possessions. But shrewd monks were able to justify this; Dundas quotes a prominent temple-dwelling monk as saying: “Eventually, the Jain religion will be destroyed. Asceticsby living in temples preserve them. There is scriptural authority for adopting an exception to a general rule to prevent the doctrine falling into abeyance.” (Dundas 2002, 137).
Jain temples gradually began to dot the Gujarati landscape. In Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (2010), Indologist John E. Cort shows that five sites in present-day Gujarat and Rajasthan came to be seen as the places where the five most popular Jain tirthankaras—Adinatha, Shantinatha, Neminatha, Parshvanatha, and Mahavira—had obtained enlightenment. Depictions of Ashtapada, the mountain on which the first tirthankara Adinatha was enlightened, also proliferated, with monks and intellectuals providing scriptural and mytho-historical justifications. By the 11thcentury CE, the sites of Girnar and Mount Abu had become the sites of spectacular temples commissioned by merchant princes.
All these developments were not without backlash. By the 11th century, a fundamentalist strain of ascetics set out to return Jain monasticism to its renunciatory roots. They began to mount public attacks and debates on temple-dwelling monks who, we are told, did not cut very impressive figures: With their “garlands and fine clothes, with coiffured hair, teeth stained with betelnut, immodest expressions, sleek bodies and feet and hands painted with lac” (Dundas 2002, 137), they hardly suited the public image of venerable saints. In 1024, we are told that the reformer Jineshvara Suri defeated temple-dwelling monks in a court debate, pushing them into decline. But the lay community were by now convinced of the efficacy of temple worship. Jainism had already changed forever.
Also read: Jaiswals, Oswals, Shahs—Gujarat’s trading families once wielded more power than medieval courts
‘Sarasvati with a beard’
Perhaps the most important lay worshippers in medieval Gujarat were a pair of merchant brothers named Vastupala and Tejapala. Their activities reveal much about the character of Jainism at this time.
Originating in an aristocratic merchant family, they were born in Anahilavada (present-day Patan, Gujarat), writes historian VK Jain in Trade and Traders in Western India AD 1000–1300 (1990). Anahilavada was the capital of the Chaulukya dynasty; the brothers rose to prominence in the service of the Vaghelas, vassals of the Chaulukyas. They seem to have fulfilled the roles of chief minister as well as “mudra-vyapara”, which involved the issuance of trade licences and permits. As governor of Khambat, Vastupala attacked, defeated and looted Said, a Muslim merchant in the employ of the kings of Southern Gujarat. (Jain 1990, 238). All of these activities were very financially rewarding; in 1233, Vastupala built a temple to the Ashtapada mountain at Girnar, believed to be the enlightenment site of the tirthankara Neminatha. He had already built a temple the previous year, to which he later added “two grand pavilions…one each for the merit of his two wives.” (Cort 2010, 130).
But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Inscriptions of the brothers appear all over Gujarat, associated with wells, tanks, alms-houses, rest-houses, and meditation spots. They are particularly focused on the aforementioned five sites of the tirthankaras’ enlightenment. The brothers also embarked on a programme of literary patronage, constructing libraries, commissioning religious texts, and even writing their own works. According to VK Jain (1990, page 244), the Jain library in Khambat possesses a manuscript actually copied out in Vastupala’s own hand; “it was because of his literary activities that Vastupala was known as ‘Sarasvati with a beard’ (kūrcāla sarasvati)”. All of these were activities that any medieval Indian king might undertake; they even commissioned a Sanskrit eulogy, describing themselves as “marking the earth everywhere with religious establishments, putting their foot on the neck of the Kali Age.” It is of extreme significance that the brothers did all of this in a very Jain imaginary, following the developments we’ve seen in the previous section.
Tejapala’s Neminatha temple at Mount Abu exemplifies all of this. This enormous structure, intricately carved in marble, reveals just how far Jainism had come since its origin. Smooth, polished bodies, similar to the iconography of a Hindu temple, adorn its pillars; sunlight shines through its delicately-perforated screens. Equipped with doctrinal innovations and patrons, Jainism had woven itself into the political culture of one of India’s greatest trading regions. Western India’s Jainism would avoid the terrible fate that was looming over South Indian Jainism—a topic to which we will return in future editions of Thinking Medieval.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval’ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)