Living Traditions 3: Your gorgeous eyes
First published in January, 2025; background to my forthcoming reflections on the 'Ancient India, Living Traditions'exhibition at the British Museum, London, May-October, 2025.
The next stop on my trip to India in 2013 was Sravanabelagola, one of the most important pilgrimage destinations for the Jain community in India. It’s best known for its 57 foot high statue of a Jain saint, considered to be the world's largest monolithic statue.1 Carved out of a single piece of rock in about 980 AD, it stands at the top of an even bigger rock.
The Jains follow the teachings of a long line of 24 saints2, one of whom, Mahavira, was a contemporary of the Buddha. Both of them lived in the 6th/5th century BC. It was a time of great social change and upheaval in India, when many were retreating to the forest or withdrawing from life in some way to reflect upon philosophical questions. The Upanishads were composed around the same time, based on the experiences of wandering ascetics. Jainism never developed beyond India in the way that Buddhism did, but it evolved from the Indian tradition, and shares some basic ideas with both Buddhism and Hinduism, such as belief in reincarnation. Jain monks follow strict rules in relation to the taking of life; including sweeping the ground in front of them to make sure that they don’t inadvertently step on a living creature.
I was going to Sravanabelagola to see some little-known mural paintings which were in the town below the great statue and the rock, rarely visited by tourists or pilgrims.
I had fallen in love with Jain manuscript paintings (originally painted onto palm leaf, and later paper, from around 11th century), when I was doing my degree.
They were some of the juiciest little images I had ever seen. I was drawn to their eyes, not only the reasonably well-known protruding distant one, but also their ‘fish’ shape, outlined in kohl, sometimes sweeping right up to their ears. Their spiky noses and busy hands, angular elbows and jaunty poses, painted with what someone has called a ‘calligraphic’ line, apparently influenced by Persian manuscripts.3
The paintings on the walls of the Charukeerthi Matha, a small Jain temple in the centre of the town of Sravanabelagola, were not quite like these. They were probably painted some time in the 19th century, as the present structure was built in the 18th century, though the temple itself was founded in the 11th century.
When I got there, there was no-one around. No-one guarding the paintings, no worshippers. No prohibition on photographing them either, but it was hard to do because it was so dark, and the flash bounced off the walls. That’s why so many of my pictures are at angles.
Now I am going to zoom in. I’m always complaining about books on Indian art being limited to simply describing iconographic and narrative detail, but these paintings don’t seem to be shown or described anywhere, and certainly not in terms of their amazing details.
They’re not as beautiful to me as the earlier manuscript paintings, which were mostly from Gujarat, in the north west of India. Karnataka, where these paintings are, is further south, and the ones here are probably around 300 years later than the manuscript ones. Many different painting styles evolved in South India during that time, and you can see some of their influences in these later Jain images. But these paintings have their own character.
The main thing I noticed compared to the murals at Mattancherry was the grid-like boxes that so many of the scenes were contained in. On a Mattancherry wall, everything was happening all at once; here there was a deliberate effort to section off different stories and events. Perhaps this carried over from the fact that the early paintings on palm leaf and paper were boxed off from the texts that they were illustrating.
Sometimes the characters played with this convention, spilling over the edges:
The paintings depict tales surrounding the lives of the Jain saints, rajas and courtly life, hunting and fighting, serving and gossiping; they were filled with animals and birds, and sometimes had mysterious details, like the decapitated men with their heads in horses mouths below:
Tragically the walls that hold these paintings are not being looked after and the images are gradually being destroyed by water ingress and time. It was a privilege to have been able to witness them all.
The final part of the 2013 trip was to the temples of Halebid and Belur, which I’ll write about next time.
Sorry for the button below, can’t get rid of it in a repost…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shravanabelagola
‘Saint’ is not necessarily a very good translation. They are 24 tirthankaras, ‘ford-crossers’, who have succeeded in crossing the sea of the endless cycle of birth and rebirth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirthankara
The human sensibility that generates these. To discover that is why I read, study most things. What human perception am I looking at… wonderful to see this. Thank you.
Well this article was great . I come from a traditional jain family from Gujarat. May I ask you have you ever travelled to palitana in gujarat. It a mountain with a few thousand steps to the top .