Jains were among the foremost patrons of sacred art, architecture and manuscript learning in Indian history. Jains were also, in places and at times, on the losing side of a religious contest, and a community whose numbers are now falling. Both halves are true. A history that tells only the first is flattery, and a history that tells only the second is grievance, and neither is any use to a child asking who we are.
This page tries to hold both. It also tries to be exact about what kind of statement each sentence is, because that is the harder discipline and the one our mission page actually committed to.
How to read this page
Every claim below carries one of three labels. Attested means there is an inscription, a dated object, a manuscript or a census behind it. Tradition means the community holds it and the community is the authority for it. Legend, disputed means it is a story with a long life and no secure historical basis, and we say so rather than repeating it as fact. Where a date is traditional rather than attested, the sentence says which. Our full standard is on the method page.
Part one: what Jains built
Mathura, around 50 BCE
Attested. At Kankali Tila in Mathura, ordinary Jain families set up ayagapatas, carved votive tablets, from around 50 BCE onward. They carry Jina figures, auspicious symbols, and inscriptions naming the people who paid for them. The donors are not kings. They are householders, merchants and a striking number of women, giving their own names in stone.
That is what makes the Mathura material remarkable rather than merely old. It is some of the earliest devotional art in India, and it is lay art, commissioned from below. The site went on producing Jain sculpture and dated inscriptions through the Kushana period, which is why Mathura is the single richest source for what early Jain practice actually looked like rather than what later texts say it looked like.
The oldest Saraswati we know of is a Jain one
Attested. A Kushana-period image from Kankali Tila, second century CE, is conventionally identified as the earliest known image of Saraswati from anywhere. It was made by Jains, for a Jain site.
This is the fact to keep in mind whenever the relationship between Jain and wider Indian religious life is described as a straightforward borrowing in one direction. The shared civilisation was genuinely shared. Jains venerated Saraswati as the embodiment of shruta, the heard and transmitted teaching, and did it early enough to leave the first surviving image of her.
Gommateshwara, 981 CE
Attested. The monolithic figure of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, about fifty-seven feet high, cut from a single rock on the crown of a hill, is conventionally dated 981 CE and was commissioned by Chavundaraya, minister and general of the Western Ganga kingdom. It is anointed in the Mahamastakabhisheka once every twelve years.
Bahubali is not a Tirthankara. He is Rishabhanatha’s son, who won a duel with his brother, understood in the moment of winning what he had wanted, and walked away from the kingdom on the spot. A community that chose that as the largest thing it would ever carve was making a statement about what it valued.
Jaisalmer, 1060 CE onward
Attested. The Jain manuscript library at Jaisalmer holds palm-leaf manuscripts going back to 1060 CE, including some of the oldest dated painted manuscript material in India.
The bhandar system, at Jaisalmer, Patan, Cambay and elsewhere, some of it kept in sealed underground rooms, preserved an extraordinary share of surviving Indian manuscript literature, and a great deal of it is not Jain. Works of grammar, poetics and philosophy from other traditions survive because Jain libraries copied and kept them. Our Gyan Panchami page is about the day that work is honoured, and the same work continues now in digitisation projects such as the Kailash Sagar Suri Gyan Mandir at Koba.
The temples, and who paid for them
Attested. The Vimala Vasahi at Dilwara was built in 1031 CE by Vimal Shah, a minister of the Chaulukya king Bhima I. The Luna Vasahi beside it, dedicated to Neminatha, was built in 1230 by the brothers Vastupala and Tejapala, ministers of the Vaghela court. Ranakpur was raised in the fifteenth century by Dharana Shah under the patronage of Rana Kumbha of Mewar.
The pattern is worth naming, because it is unusual. These are not royal temples. They were paid for by ministers and merchants, people who could have built palaces and did not, and the marble carving at Dilwara is still among the finest surviving work of its kind anywhere in India.
Literature, in languages that were not Sanskrit
Attested. Jain authors are foundational to early Kannada literature: Pampa, Ponna and Ranna, the three writers conventionally called the gems of tenth-century Kannada, were all Jains. In Tamil, the Jivaka Chintamani is the work of the Jain monk Tiruttakkatevar, and the Naladiyar, one of the didactic classics, is attributed to Jain ascetics.
Tradition. Our own tradition remembers Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, as the teacher of the seventy-two arts: writing, craft, agriculture, commerce. That is a claim of the tradition about its own origins, not a historical statement, and we mark it. But it tells you the self-understanding: the first thing the first teacher is remembered for giving is material civilisation.
Royal patronage, and the honest size of it
Attested. Jain communities received substantial patronage from the Western Ganga, Rashtrakuta, Chaulukya and early Hoysala courts, recorded in inscriptions and land grants.
Tradition, with a scholarly caveat. The Chaulukya king Kumarapala, in twelfth-century Gujarat, is remembered by Jain tradition as a convert under the influence of Acharya Hemachandra, and as the issuer of amari proclamations restricting animal slaughter in his territory. Historians differ on how far the conversion went and how far the proclamations were enforced. The patronage is not in doubt. The conversion narrative is a tradition, and we label it as one.
Part two: the harder half
The decline in the south
Attested in outline, contested in detail. From roughly the seventh century onward, Jainism lost ground steadily in the Tamil country and later in Karnataka, as the Shaiva and Vaishnava devotional movements gained royal and popular support. Temples changed hands. Patronage moved. Communities that had produced major literature became small.
What is genuinely contested is the mechanism: how much was persuasion, how much was the withdrawal of royal favour, how much was coercion. Serious historians disagree, and a page that resolved that disagreement in either direction would be claiming an authority it does not have.
The Madurai impalement story
Legend, disputed. The story is that eight thousand Jains were impaled at Madurai after losing a religious contest with the Shaiva saint Sambandar. It is depicted in murals, it is remembered in Shaiva devotional literature, and it circulates today in both directions: as a Jain grievance and as a triumph.
We are not going to present it as an event. The account appears in hagiographical literature composed centuries after the period it describes, there is no contemporary evidence for it, and modern historians generally treat it as hagiography rather than as a record. That is the state of the evidence, and stating it is not a defence of anybody: an atrocity that cannot be established is not thereby disproved, and we are not claiming it was.
We mention it at all for one reason. Jains encounter this story, and the two easy responses to it are to repeat it as proof of what was done to us, or to pretend it does not exist. Both are failures of the same kind. The third option is the one this site was built for: say what the evidence is, say what it is not, and leave the reader able to check.
Bukka Raya’s edict, 1368
Attested. An inscription at Shravanabelagola records that in 1368 the Vijayanagara king Bukka Raya I heard a dispute between the Jain community and the Vaishnavas, and ruled that the Jains were to have the same protection as the Vaishnavas, with any harm done to the one to be treated as harm done to the other. He placed the hand of the Jains in the hand of the Vaishnavas, and the settlement was to hold as long as the sun and moon endured.
Read it honestly and it says two things at once, which is exactly why it belongs here. There was conflict serious enough to need a king’s ruling. And the ruling went the way it went, and was cut in stone, and is still legible.
Our own disagreements
Attested. The Jain community has spent a great deal of its history arguing with itself, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
The Digambara and Shvetambara traditions divided over ascetic practice, the status of the canon and the possibility of a woman attaining liberation. In the Shvetambara tradition the nineteenth Tirthankara, Mallinatha, is a woman; the Digambara tradition holds that all twenty-four were male. Sthanakvasi practice, which is aniconic, traces back to the reform associated with Lonka Shah in the fifteenth century, with the order conventionally dated to the seventeenth; the Terapanth was founded by Acharya Bhikshu in 1760. Control of major pilgrimage sites, Girnar and Shikharji among them, has been contested between Digambara and Shvetambara communities for centuries and has repeatedly reached the courts.
We do not adjudicate any of this. Where the traditions differ, both readings go on the page labelled by tradition, and your own sangh’s practice governs. That rule is set out on our method page and it applies to history as much as to a tithi.
Now
Attested. The Census of India recorded the Jain population growing 5.37 percent between 2001 and 2011, the lowest decadal growth of any religious community in the country, with about two hundred thousand fewer Jain children at the end of that decade than at the start. Jains were notified as a minority community by the Government of India in January 2014.
Attested. The Pew Research Center’s Religion in India study of 2021 found that two-thirds of Jains say they have a lot in common with Hindus, while only 19 percent of Hindus say the same about Jains. Our mission page puts the consequence in one line: we see everyone, and almost nobody sees us.
That asymmetry is not a grievance and it is not anybody’s fault. It is a measurement, and it is the measurement this whole site was built in response to.
What we will not print
Three claims circulate constantly in forwards, speeches and community publications, and we will not repeat any of them.
- Any figure for the Jain share of India’s income tax collection.
- Any figure for the Jain share of national property or wealth.
- Any figure for the Jain share of the diamond trade.
The reason is not modesty. It is that we could not source them. India does not publish tax collection by religion, so a percentage of that kind could not be verified even in principle, and the wealth and trade figures we traced lead back to other people repeating them rather than to any survey or return. A community that is asking to be seen accurately cannot afford to be the source of unverifiable numbers about itself, and a page about honest history is the worst possible place to start.
If you hold an actual source for any of these, an official publication or a survey with a method, send it to us. We would publish it with the citation attached, and we would log the change.
How to check any of this
Every attested item above is checkable by an ordinary reader. The Mathura material is in the Government Museum at Mathura and in published excavation reports of Kankali Tila. The Shravanabelagola inscriptions, Bukka Raya’s included, are in the published Epigraphia Carnatica volumes. The census figures are on the Registrar General’s site. The Pew study is free to download.
Where we have got something wrong, we would rather know. Errors on this site are fixed and then logged with a date on our corrections page, including our own. Corrections are seva, and they are the most useful thing a reader can send.
Related
- The Jain Ramayana: the Rama who kills nobody
- Krishna, Neminatha and the Jain Harivamsha
- Gyan Panchami: the day knowledge itself is honoured
- Santhara and sallekhana: what the tradition actually holds
- Our method: the editions, rules and limits behind every page
- Our missions: claim your story
Frequently asked questions
↳ Were Jains persecuted in India?
In places and at times, yes, and the record is more complicated than either of the usual answers. Jainism lost ground steadily in the Tamil country and later in Karnataka from around the seventh century, temples changed hands and patronage moved, and historians disagree about how much of that was persuasion, how much was the withdrawal of royal favour and how much was coercion. The best-known persecution story, the impalement of eight thousand Jains at Madurai, comes from hagiographical literature written long afterwards and has no contemporary evidence behind it, so we do not present it as an event. Against that, an inscription of 1368 at Shravanabelagola records a Vijayanagara king ruling that Jains were to have the same protection as Vaishnavas.
↳ What did Jains contribute to Indian art and learning?
A great deal, and much of it is datable. Votive ayagapata tablets at Mathura from around 50 BCE are among the earliest devotional art in India and were paid for by ordinary householders, many of them women. The earliest known image of Saraswati from anywhere is a second-century Jain sculpture from the same site. The monolithic Bahubali at Shravanabelagola is conventionally dated 981 CE. Jain manuscript libraries preserved an enormous share of surviving Indian literature, including non-Jain works, and Jain authors are foundational to early Kannada and important in Tamil.
↳ Is it true that Jains pay a large share of India's income tax?
We have found no source for any such figure and we do not publish one. India does not release income tax collection broken down by religion, so a percentage of that kind cannot be verified even in principle. The same applies to the circulating claims about the Jain share of national wealth or of the diamond trade: the trail leads back to other people repeating them rather than to any survey or official return. If you hold a genuine source, send it and we will publish it with the citation.
↳ Why is the Jain population falling?
The Census of India recorded 5.37 percent growth in the Jain population between 2001 and 2011, the lowest decadal growth of any religious community in the country, with roughly two hundred thousand fewer Jain children at the end of the decade than at the start. The census reports the numbers rather than the causes, and we will not invent causes it does not give. Jains were notified as a minority community by the Government of India in January 2014.
↳ How do you decide what counts as history on this site?
Every claim carries a label. Attested means there is an inscription, a dated object, a manuscript or a census behind it. Tradition means the community holds it and the community is the authority for it. Legend or disputed means the story has a long life and no secure historical basis, and we say so instead of repeating it. Where the sects differ we give both readings labelled by tradition rather than picking a winner, and where we get something wrong we fix it and log it with a date on the corrections page.
Sources and labels. The Mathura ayagapatas and the Kankali Tila material follow published scholarship on the site and the collections of the Government Museum, Mathura; the identification of the Kushana-period Mathura sculpture as the earliest known Saraswati image follows standard reference accounts. The Gommateshwara date of 981 CE and Chavundaraya's patronage, and the 1368 edict of Bukka Raya I, follow the published Shravanabelagola inscriptions in the Epigraphia Carnatica series as reported in standard references. The Jaisalmer bhandar dating from 1060 CE follows museum and library descriptions of the collection, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art's account of Jain manuscript painting. Dilwara 1031 and 1230, and Ranakpur in the fifteenth century, follow published architectural histories. Kannada and Tamil attributions follow standard literary histories; the Naladiyar attribution to Jain ascetics is traditional and is labelled. The Kumarapala conversion narrative is tradition, and the scholarly disagreement about its extent is noted rather than resolved. The Madurai impalement account is treated as legend of disputed historicity, as the page states in full. Demographic figures are from the Census of India 2011 and published analyses of it, and the mutual-perception figures are from the Pew Research Center's Religion in India (2021); both are restated as our mission page gives them. We deliberately publish no figure for the Jain share of income tax, property or the diamond trade, because no source for any of them could be established. Corrections are seva: tell us.