Jaina Temple Architecture in India: The Development of a Distinct Language in Space and Ritual

Language: English
Pages: 705 (Throughout Color Illustrations)

Preface
On innumerable travels throughout the Indian subcontinent over the past eighteen years, I saw large
numbers of Jaina temples. Due to my particular interest in the ritual use, as well as the philosophical and
religious meanings attached to architecture, I was frequently impressed by the enormous complexity and
striking distinctiveness of the temples. It was with great surprise and disappointment that I usually found
nothing or surprisingly little written about these often highly unusual and intricate Jaina structures, which
in grandeur and splendour surpassed so many of the other buildings discussed at great length in travel
guides and art-historical studies. The reason for their absence from the available literature seemed not to be
due to a lack of artistic ability on the side of the builders and sculptors of Jaina temples, but due to a lack
of awareness and interest in Jainism and its material culture on the side of the writers. This shortcoming
provided the impulse to collect and assemble the data to present a first comprehensive overview of Jaina
sacred architecture in India, and to emphasise its typical and unifying aspects in the various regions of
the subcontinent. It is as part of my Habilitation, submitted to the Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische
Hochschule (RWTH) in Aachen in October 2006, which was examined in January 2008, that this goal has
been addressed and put into practice.

In the period between 1998 and 2006, I returned to many sites I had seen on previous research
visits, and during more than eighteen months of fieldwork, I complemented these with a large amount of
new material from Jaina sites found in every corner of the subcontinent.