Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings

Textiles, embroidered with religious imagery, express lay piety in public and private shrines

This beautifully illustrated volume highlights Jain devotional textiles (choḍs) from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Fashioned in the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra, these works of velvet and sateen cloth, lavishly embroidered with gold and silver gilt thread, depict Jain mythology, influential spiritual teachers, sacred sites, and ritual traditions. Visualizing Devotion delves into the innovative material approaches taken by the creators of choḍs, the captivating religious stories they convey, and the social lives of these objects in Jain communities. They offer a mode of devotional patronage to lay people, who frequently commission them as gifts for places of worship in recognition of deceased relatives or upon completion of important rituals, such as monastic initiation or a lengthy fast.

Syona Puliady is curator of textiles of the Eastern Hemisphere at the Fowler Museum at UCLA who studies textiles of the Indian Ocean realm and how they create notions of intimacy, sensuality, and spirituality, contributing to the region’s cultural ethos. Lynna R. Dhanani is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, who currently explores the confluence of polemics and poetics in the Sanskrit and old vernacular hymns of the Śvetāmbara Jain scholar-monk Hemacandra (1089–1172). Steven M. Vose is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado Denver who investigates Jain communities in western India and their interactions with both political powers and other religious communities from the tenth century to the present.