Engaging with Jain Visual Culture by Pratapaditya Pal
text and images © the author except as where otherwise noted

June 27, 2020

(click on the small image for full screen image with captions.)


1

Fig. 1 My engagement with Jain art and architecture began when I was 10 years old in 1945. I still vividly remember being taken to the Jain temple of what we Bengalis call Pareshnāth in Kolkata (then known as Calcutta in English) (fig. 1). It was a memorable visit as it was so different from the famous Kālı temple in south Calcutta (the Jain shrine was in the north of the city) for it differed notably from the former with its large crowds and hustle and bustle where getting a glimpse of the image of the goddess was an intimidating experience for a Hindu lad. The Pareshnāth temple by contrast was an abode of peace and quiet in a beautiful garden with a pool where multicolored fish swam around to a child’s delight. Much later I realized that Pareshnāth was the Bengali name of the Jain “god” Pārśvanāth, though my Hindu mother regarded him as a form of the Hindu Śiva who is often seated in meditation and is associated with the snake. Such confusion is not unusual among Indians who are not generally into “iconography.”


Fig. 2 In 1956 when I joined the Calcutta University for post-graduate studies in Ancient Indian History and Culture, I realized that along with Hindu and Buddhist art that of the Jains was also part of the syllabus. During the two years of the course, however, there was little mention of Jain art in the classes I attended except when we were taught the art of Mathura of the Kushān period of Indian history (1st-3rd century CE). This included Jain antiquities of Kankali Tila of that city but the emphasis was on Buddhist and Hindu art, as was the case with the following Gupta period as well (fig. 2). It was only much later on my own I learnt how important the contributions of the Jain communities were during the first half of the first millennium CE. As to the later periods—our course ending around ca 1200 CE— we did become familiar with the Jain temples of Dilwara in Rajasthan, and the Hoysala architecture of Karnataka. Most of my early knowledge of Jain art and architecture was derived from two textbooks we had to read: Ananda Coomaraswamy’s History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) and the more recent survey of Benjamin Rowland (1953), titled, The Art and Architecture of India Buddhist, Hindu and Jain. It is noteworthy that even in 1953, six years after the subcontinent was partitioned into two sovereign states—India and Pakistan—Rowland used the moniker India, rather than the currently accepted “South Asia.”


Fig. 3 More significant was the fact that Rowland included the term “Jain” in the subtitle of his book, perhaps the first art historian to give recognition to Jain art on equal footing with Hindu and Buddhist art. It should be mentioned that so did the Indian Constitution adopted in 1956, where the religion is included with a beautifully illustrated image of a painted Jina or Tīrthankara (fig. 3). Interestingly it is an image adapted from the tradition of a Śetāmbara Jain manuscript illustration and not a sculptural representation. In passing it may be pointed out that archaeological evidence in the subcontinent indicate a greater antiquity for both stone and metal images of the Jinas than those of both Hinduism and Buddhism.

It was during our regular classes at the Ashutosh Museum of the University and at the Indian Museum that I became acquainted with Jain art inadvertently. Both had collections formed by the Nahar family of Kolkata as I have discussed elsewhere [Pal 2015: 62-63]. Originally from Marwar in Rajasthan, the Nahars had settled first in Murshidabad, the capital of Bengal before the take over by the British East Indian Company in the 18th century. Originally a banking family, the Nahars became landowners as well, and being Jain, they built temples and collected Jain images and manuscripts. Before his death, Rai Bahadur Manilal Nahar (1865–1927) bequeathed a portion of the family collection to the Indian Museum where a gallery was named the “Nahar Gallery.” Later in 1939 the remainder of the collection was transferred to the Ashutosh Museum, but in neither institution are the donors adequately recognized for their benefactions, or the collections properly displayed.

2
If I am not mistaken, early art historical studies in India began as an adjunct of archaeological exploration pioneered mostly by European scholars in the 18th century inspired by Sir William Jones (1746–1794). For Jain studies in particular we must recall Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821) who was probably the first employee of the East India Company to explore, loot and collect Jain art. As the archaeologist Haribishnu Sarkar (1981:93) has written:

Colin Mackenzie, who may be called the Cunningham of the South, visited every site of antiquarian importance during his long career of thirty-eight years. In the course of his visits he prepared 2,600 drawings to scale, 78 plans and collected 8,076 inscriptions, 6,228 coins and 106 sculptures (Roy 1961:18). This he did over and above his own official preoccupations; he retired from the service as Surveyor General [of India]. What is praiseworthy is that he met the entire expenses on his research out of his own purse despite the official approbation [1].

For a Scotsman this is a remarkable tribute indeed!


Fig. 4 Among the sculptures, some of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I illustrate a Pārśvanāth in stone of superb quality from Gulbarga (Andhra Pradesh), then in the Mysore State of Tipu Sultan and its sketch by Mackenzie himself (figs. 4 & 5). Both the sketch, now in the British Library, and the sculpture, were sent to London in 1806; the former shows what a skillful draughtsman he was. However, the earliest scholar to publish the first major history of Jain art and architecture was James Burgess (1832–1916) in 1869. The serious study of Jain painting had to wait almost a half-century longer until Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) [AKC] in 1914.

It is well known that until early in the 20th century apart from the ancient Buddhist murals, the most familiar South Asian paintings were palm-leaf manuscript illustrations of the Buddhists between the 10th and 12th centuries, and much later, Mughal paintings of the 16th century and thereafter. It was the great contribution of Coomaraswamy to introduce the world to what is now commonly known as “Rajput” pictures with his publications in the 1910s. Less well known is that he was equally a pioneer in augmenting our knowledge of Jain manuscript illustrations which somewhat reduced the yawning gap in the story of Indian painting between illuminated Buddhist manuscripts of eastern India and the Mughal pictures of the 16th century.


Fig. 5 The first article AKC published on the subject was in 1914 (see Crouch 2002 and Cohen 2003). Thereafter he regularly wrote about Jain art, the last in 1943, four years before his death in 1947. Thus, Richard J. Cohen, the American scholar who edited a volume of Coomaraswamy’s contributions to the subject, was on the button when he wrote: “Ananda Coomaraswamy’s writing on Jain art practically span the entire period of his active working life as an art historian” (Cohen 2003: 9). His most productive period of contribution was in the early 1920s when he produced the introductory volume (1923) to the Boston Museum’s catalogues of the Indian collections. In 1924 he wrote an entire volume titled Jain Paintings and Illustrations, the first book to discuss the subject. I have no doubt that these were the works that inspired a fellow American Indologist William Norman Brown (1892–1975) to be the first American scholar to study Jain illustrated manuscripts in the following decades (1934 and 1941).

I did not read Coomaraswamy’s books on Jain art nor those of Brown until I joined the Boston Museum in 1967 and took stock of the collections. However, my love for iconography as “the essence of art’, as AKC frequently declared, was developed while I was a postgraduate at Calcutta University. This was of course in Hindu and Buddhist iconography taught by two eminent teachers: Jitendra Nath Banerjea and Sarasi Kumar Saraswati. It was also during this period that I had the good fortune to meet Umakant P. Shah of Baroda who used to visit Calcutta often to edit the Journal of Indian Oriental Society jointly with Srimati Tagore. It would not be an exaggeration to regard Shah as the most prolific scholar to date for enlightening us about Jain art and iconography, especially of the north Indian Jain traditions. Through his works I came across the name of a slim volume on Jain iconography by an earlier scholar, B.C. Bhattacharya of Banaras published in 1939. Although I have not succeeded in recovering the exact dates of his life, he was a younger contemporary of Coomaraswamy, and both had begun to work on Jain art about the same time in the second decade of the 20th century. I am grateful to my colleague and friend Dr. Anjan Chakraverty of the Banaras Hindu University for providing information for the following brief account of his work.

Brindaban Chandra Bhattacharya was a scholar and collector of art in the city of Banaras. He was particularly interested in the antiquarian history of his city and I have elsewhere written about him briefly (Pal 2015). He lived in the Somapura neighborhood but unfortunately the fate of his collection is not known. Only one object, a statue of a Sarnath Buddha which he recovered, is now in the Bharat Kala Bhavan [2]. He began publishing in the 1920s, and though we do not know why he was attracted to Jain art, by his own admission, he began collecting materials as early as 1919, as he writes in the preface to his 1939 volume.

We do not know if he and Coomaraswamy met in Banaras during the latter’s visit in 1920-22 (not improbable), or on earlier occasions a decade before. What can be inferred is that as an enthusiastic antiquarian and collector Bhattacharya must have formed part of the enlightened circle of other local collectors and scholars that included Babu Sitaram Shah, a well known collector of Mughal paintings, the family of the theosophist Bhagawan Das, who hosted Coomaraswamy on one of his visits, and, of course, Rai Krishnadas and family, the founder of the Bharat Kala Bhavan whom I got to know well during my stay in Banaras in 1966-67 (Pal 2015). Unfortunately, at the time I did not press him, or his son, Ananda Krishna, about Brindaban Bhattacharya, nor did anyone mention him.

Not only does he complain in the preface to his 1939 book about the difficulties of hunting for Jain art, but to quote his own words,

To rescue the hitherto hidden materials of Jain iconography from their hidden places, I turned my attention in the first place to the published and unpublished literature of the Jain schools. To be justly enlightened on the subject freely sought the guidance of orthodox Jain scholars who deeply learned in Jain philosophy, were unable to adequately indicate the various texts relating to the Jain images, scattered over in their ritualistic literature. In order to find these, I took to exploring the different manuscript collections preserved in far distant places of our country. This involved me in visits to Arrah, Agra, Bikaner, Baroda, Ahmadabad, Rajkot and several other places, where such literature was to be found.

He further mentions that he visited all the museums of northern India and numerous sites of Jain ruins; it took him three years to gather his material. We do not know if he received grants (unlikely) to undertake these journeys or was dependent on his own financial resources. However, in the last paragraph he thanks Kumar Probodhendu Nath Tagore (of Calcutta Tagore clan?) “for some financial help.” He also expresses his appreciation to Khan Bahadur Maqsud Ali Khan, the Chief Secretary to H.H. the Maharaja of Banaras, for his “benevolent encouragement and ready sympathy.” In view of the current communal discord in India today, I thought this instance of the harmonious cooperation among a Hindu maharaja, his Muslim secretary and an ardent brahman scholar of Jainism is worth recalling.

Later in 1974 Bhattacharya’s seminal work on Jain iconography was reprinted in a new edition with a substantial foreword by Dr. B.N. Sharma. I still treasure a signed copy (by Sharma) of that edition which I have used as copiously as the classic works of Hindu iconography by Dr. Jitendra Nath Banerjea my teacher at Calcutta University, and that on Buddhist iconography by Dr. Benoytosh Bhattacharya. In his foreword B.N. Sharma does not mention Coomaraswamy’s Jain works, but gives due credit to Bhattacharya’s pioneering contributions to “the field of Jain iconography” and recognizes his “great service to the students of Jainology.”

3

Fig. 6 Coomaraswamy’s contribution to the study of Jain art certainly inspired several scholars both in America and India. I have already mentioned Prof. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania, a towering figure in Indology in America after Coomaraswamy. In India the Indian Civil Service officer N.C. Mehta and Dr. Moti Chandra, for many years the director of the Prince of Wales Museum of Western India (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Samgrahalaya [CSMVS in short]) made significant contributions. Dr. Chandra too originally belonged to a distinguished family of Banaras.

It was also in Banaras that I first met Madhusudan Dhaki in 1966. Like U.P. Shah, he too was from Gujrat and both followed the Jain faith. I don’t think anyone will disagree that in the second half of the 20th century in post-colonial India, Shah and Dhaky have been two of the most outstanding and productive scholars of Jain art and architecture particularly for the Śvetāmbara order. Both were very genial and genteel personalities and generous in sharing their polymathic knowledge about Indian art and Indology. Dhaky and I worked together at the beautiful palace of the former Rewa State on the river where the first incarnation of the American Institute of Indian Studies as American Academy of Benares was set up in 1965. A fine obituary of Dhaky was published in Jain Studies, the newsletter of the Centre of Jain Studies of SOAS) March 2017, Issue 12, pp. 45-46).


Fig. 7 Sarabhai Nawab of Ahmedabad should also be recalled both as a scholar and a publisher of books on Jain art in particular, and Jainology in general. As far as I know no other individual Indian has combined the two professions so enthusiastically, though the Jain community remains prominent in disseminating the message of their teachers and their teachings. I should also mention Dr. Saryu Doshi and Dr. Sridhar Andhare both of whom I first met at the CSMVS museum in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the summer of 1965. Later the late Andhare would be a co-curator with me for the first major exhibition of Jain art—The Peaceful Liberators—in 1994. In 1965 Saryu was doing her Ph.D. with Dr. Chandra in Jain paintings and Andhare had recently joined the museum. Both were doubtless inspired by the amiable and polymathic Moti Chandra, who had expanded the museum’s Jain collection during his long tenure as director.

I illustrate here the finest example of a standing Karnataka Bahubali in bronze from the museum collection which I saw then for the first time and which bears a close stylistic kinship with the seated Jina in the Heeramaneck collection at LACMA (fig. 6 and 7). Also at the time, I had noticed how similar stylistically the two bronzes were to the colossal and amazing Gomateshwara at Shravanavelgola on the hilltop carved from live rock (fig. 8). Indeed one might think of the CSMVS bronze as a maquette for the stone version. The three works are informed with the same sense of aesthetic vision and spiritual energy notwithstanding their differences in size.

4
While during the first half of the 20th century Jain pedagogy continued to lay greater emphasis on literature and religion, in the second half more attention was given to the visual culture of the Jains both in India and the west. Apart from art historical studies of greater diversity and depth, museums and private collectors, especially in the USA, began vigorously acquiring Jain artworks. Few of the individual collectors are Indian Jains, however, who may have had an innate prejudice in keeping old art in the home [3]. By the last decade of the century, it became possible to organize the exhibition The Peaceful Liberators mentioned above at the LACMA where I was able since 1970 to considerably augment the Jain component of the initial Indian collection of Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck that the museum acquired in 1969.

A Parsi from Bombay, Nasli was an ecumenical collector like Denman Ross and Coomaraswamy of Boston in the early decades of the century. Before his death in 1971 Nasli had helped American museums in adding Jain objects to their collections. Although he had lost an eye in childhood in an accident while playing cricket, his visual aplomb was not impaired, as may be deemed from the aforementioned elegant LACMA meditating Jina from Kanataka that graces the cover of the catalogue of the exhibition (fig. 7). The Heeramaneck collection included several other Jain bronzes of quality, but none in stone or wood. In passing, it should be mentioned that, unlike the Hindus and the Buddhists, the Jains prefer not to use clay or terracotta for making images, because of their strong insistence on ahimsā or non-violence. Using clay risks taking life as it inadvertently endangers insects. Collecting Jain stone sculptures appears to have gained popularity in America among both private collectors and museums largely in the second half of the 20th century. Following the law of economics increasing demand always inflates prices of art objects [4].

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fortunately, I was able to add a substantial number of stone and metal sculptures to the collection of LACMA where I worked most of my life, two of which I illustrate here. One, of the 7th century, represents a fine example in sandstone from Uttar Pradesh of a distinctive Jain theme generally identified as the “Parents of the Jina,” presumably inspired by the earlier and more familiar Śiva family group or Umā-Maheśvara theme of the Hindus (fig. 9); the other is a magnificent gilt-metal tableau with multiple figures of Jinas and deities from Gujarat (fig. 10). Art historically as well it is an important piece, for apart from its iconographic and aesthetic significance, it is inscribed and dated, thereby providing us with other historical information [5]. More impressive for its size and its gracefulness is the marble relief of the Goddess of learning Sarasvatı carved by a sculptor named Jagadeva (fig. 11) [6]. Indeed, one of the unusual characteristics of Jain sculptures is the extraordinary number of artworks that include donative inscriptions with detailed information of their context. U.P. Shah’s writings alone would be a good start for a scholar to produce a corpus of all such Jain inscribed sculptures. Models for such research would be the writings of the Buddhist scholars Gregory Schopen and Peter Skilling, and, among Jain scholars, of John E. Cort (2010).


Fig. 12 Southern California is fortunate in having another comprehensive and superlative collection of Indian sculpture in the greater Los Angeles area at the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena. I had the good fortune to help Mr. Simon assemble his great Asian collection, which has a number of important Jain sculptures in both stone and metal [7]. I include here a stone figure of a rare standing Digambara Supārśvanātha from Karnataka to demonstrate its close stylistic kinship with the two arresting metal Jinas from CSMVS and LACMA (fig. 12 and cf. 5 and 6).

The Peaceful Liberators traveled to three other venues in the States and ended up at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a rich repository of Jain art including the Mackenzie collection as noted. Thus the exhibition gained the status of being the first of its kind in Europe as well. However, Europe would get its own Jain art exhibition in 2000 titled Steps to Liberation: 2,500 years of Jain Art and Religion organized by Jan Van Alphen, the European Indologist. He later moved to New York to become for a while the director of the institution where the next major exhibition of Jain art was organized in 2009 at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York. The museum was founded by collectors and philanthropists Donald and Shelly Rubin to showcase their Himalayan art collection, which was their first love.

The Rubins began collecting Tibetan art initially from the New York art dealer Navin Kumar. The Kumar brothers are well-known collectors and dealers in Delhi and New York for Tibetan, Jain, Tantric as well as Modern and Contemporary Indian art. Interestingly, they are themselves followers of the Jain faith but eclectic in their taste for art. In any event, Victorious Ones: Jain Images of Perfection, the Rubin Museum exhibition, was curated by Phyllis Granoff, an eminent American Indologist along with contributions from a slew of prominent Jainologists of Europe and American academia. Indeed, it can be stated unambiguously that the last quarter of the 20th century witnessed an explosion of the study of Jainism as an academic discipline in both European and American universities, mostly in religious studies but also in art. This becomes evident from a perusal of the extensive bibliographic citations in the Rubin Museum exhibition catalogue. Today Jainology is a popular subject of study in numerous universities in America and Europe, especially in contrast to the paucity of such opportunities in the first half of the 20th century. In India while the followers are ardent patrons of the faith and pilgrimage centers thrive, a major exhibition of Jain art emphasizing its great diversity is yet to be organized.

5
A year after the exhibition at the Rubin Museum in 2009, another show with a large group of Jain bronzes was organized at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Dr. Siddharth Bhansali, a cardiologist by profession and trustee of the museum is a Gujrati Jain and in early life acquired European art. As he remarks in the catalogue of the exhibition (Pal 2010: 8) “The Eureka moment came about 35 years ago when at an auction in London, I encountered an early Jain bronze. It hit me in the pit of my stomach.” I might add also it set his heart aflutter. This epiphany was not enough, however, and he called his mother in Mumbai for blessings whether collecting old images would be kosher. Fortunately she assented and in a little over a decade Dr. Bhansali assembled an outstanding collection of Jain bronzes (and also some stone sculptures), showcased in the exhibition and catalogue titled The Elegant Image Bronzes from the Indian Subcontinent in the Siddhartha K. Bhasali Collection.

The second avid collector of Jain art lives in Orange County on the West coast. He also is a doctor and we met for the first time in 1990 while I was scouting for The Peaceful Liberators exhibition. Other than Navin Kumar, Dr. Narendra Parson was the second Jain patron to enthusiastically support the project, especially among the local Jain community. Incidentally, he and his wife Rita are fellow Calcuttans and, in fact, while Narendra’s father was a gem merchant, Rita is a direct descendant of the famous Nahar family discussed earlier in this article. Both moreover happily cooperated in the last art exhibition of my professional career involving Jain art in 2016. Titled Puja & Piety: Hindu, Jain and Buddhist Art from the Indian Subcontinent, the exhibition demonstrates through visual arts the unity and diversity, both in theory and praxis, among the three major religions that originated over two millennia ago on the Indian subcontinent. As the scholar Anjan Chakraverty observed cogently in his review of the publication in Indian’s Marg magazine (vol. 69, no. 4 2017): “It is important to note that the patron the artist and the worshipper [of all three religions] motivated by puja and piety in pursuit of liberation from the cycle of rebirth or consequences of deeds, collectively created images as ‘aids to devotion.’”

It is well known that in ancient times, Jains, whether merchants or monks, did not travel beyond the subcontinent for either trade or for religious proselytization. Unlike those of the Hindus and Buddhists, few works of Jain art have been found anywhere outside the subcontinent in the east or the west except what may have been taken out by Europeans during the last three centuries or so. No examples of Jain art have ever been found in Southeast or East Asia where both Hinduism and Buddhism spread from the early centuries of the first millennium CE. Even though trade flourished between India and the lands beyond the Indian ocean and the Arabian Sea since prehistoric times, especially in beads with Africa and Western Asia, there is no evidence of any exchange of religious artifacts until the historical period of Mahāvīra and the Buddha. It is interesting that the early historic period in Indian historiography is still designated as the “Age of the Buddha”; “Age of the Teachers” would be a better designation which would not exclude Mahāvīra the historical founder of Jainism [8].

Curiously, in the 20th century, especially in the second half the Jain communities have been on the move in large numbers. Today they dominate the diamond industry in Europe, play important roles in the commercial and academic worlds of both UK and North America. Their strongest presence, however, is in the US; particularly in California (where I am domiciled), the Jains form prosperous communities in technology, medicine and philanthropy. I do not have any statistical evidence but can vouch for the fact that there are as many as, if not more, Jain temples and cultural centers in California than those of the Hindus and Sikhs. Incidentally, Buddhism is patronized in the west by other Asian populations, such as the Chinese, Thais and Japanese, since the faith lost ground in the subcontinent itself gradually after the 12th c. CE. Both Hindus and Buddhists traveling by land and ocean flourished in East and Southeast Asia, but no evidence of such adventurism by the Jains is known. As a faith Jainism, however, has fewer converts than other religions of Indic origin.

When I first came to the States in 1967 and worked in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for three years, I do not remember meeting a single Indian expatriate who was interested in the museum’s famous Indian collection. Then I moved to LACMA in 1970 from where I retired in 1995. In my 25 years with LACMA too I met very few Indians who were interested in Indian art. Neither did they patronize the museum by becoming members or by providing financial support for Indian educational or exhibition programs with a very few exceptions. In 1990 when I decided to organize the first major exhibition of Jain art with loans from Europe and India and appealed to the local burgeoning Jain community for financial help only three Jains responded, one local, another in New York and the third in New Orleans. For me that was a victory of sorts. How times have changed!

Now that the year 2020 will mark the 25th anniversary of my retirement from LACMA, a wealthy Californian Jain approached me recently with a promise of generous financial support to organize another exhibition of Jain art. I was flattered and gratified, but, alas, at my age (85), it is time to “cool it,” as my grandchildren say, and tread gingerly the path (mārga) of moksha (liberation), whether achieved through the guidance of the Devas, the Jinas or the Buddhas.
While it is noble of the Jain diasporic communities to patronize their faith, let us not forget that the Indian subcontinent is the only land mass on our much maligned earth where all the major religions of mankind have coexisted, albeit with occasional and inevitable conflicts, for the last two millennia.


Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this article: Rob Aft, Ian Alsop, Vajra Alsop, Robin Dean, Nancy Rivera, and Sameer Tuladhar.


Endnotes

1. See Sarkar 1981: 50-51, for quote and more comments about demolishing monuments and removing them to Britain. In 2017 an exhibition about the Mackenzie (characterized as the “Collector Extraordinaire”) collection was organized by The Museum Nan Eilnan of Stornoway in Scotland as a tribute to the town’s native son. I do not know if a catalogue was published but a well illustrated review by Jennifer Howe (2017) appeared in the art newspaper Asian Art even as the Brexit movement was heating up in the U.K. A book on Colin Mackenzie is overdue.

2. It is possible that he donated some of his Jain collection to the museum as well but the records are not well kept and need further exploration.

3. Followers of all three Indic religions–Jain, Hindu, Buddhist–do not favor keeping old, damaged images in their homes as they are considered inauspicious and unworthy of veneration.

4. This became clear soon after The Peaceful Liberators exhibition in which I included a Chola stone Jina from a private collection in Los Angeles; the owner who had acquired it a couple of decades earlier for a couple of thousand dollars, put a $10,000 insurance value on it for the duration of the exhibition, after which, it sold at auction for $75,000.

5. Pal 1994: 306. The artist’s name is Mahipati and he is characterized curiously as vijñānika [literally a scientist or knowledgeable], an uncommon word to describe a sculptor.

6. Pal 1994: 306. Although not much else is known about Jagadeva he must have been one of the most eminent artists of Gujrat. I know of no other instance of such explicit information of such destruction and replacement.

7. See Pal 2003: 288-289. The collection also has a small charming bronze Supārśanātha of the same age. The five headed snake distinguishes him from the more familiar Pārśvanātha who has a seven headed serpent canopy. The iconography of both could also lead to confusion with the Buddha protected by Muchalinda theme.

8. Traditionally, the first of the 24 teachers was Ādinātha, would have lived centuries before Mahāvīra who is considered to be the last. He is also known as Rishabhanāth or Lord of the bull (rishabha), which too is a synonym of Śiva’s bull. One can thus understand the confusion of ordinary people in recognizing who is who. In fact, it is a wonder that the bull headed figure on the Indus Valley seal identified by Sir John Marshal, as “Proto-Śiva” has not been characterized as “Rishabhanātha.”

References:

Bhattacharya, Brindavan Chandra. 1939. The Jain Iconography, Lahore. Reprinted 1968 (edited by B.N. Sharma). Delhi: Motilal Banrasidas.

Brown, W. Norman. 1934. Miniature Painting of the Jain Kalpasūtra. Washington D.C. Smithsonian Institute.
––––––––––––––––. 1941. Manuscript Illustrations of the Uttarādhyānasūtra. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Burgess, James. 1869. The Temples of Śatruñjaya. Bombay: Sykes & Dwyer. Reprinted 1976, Gandhinagur: Motilal Banrasidas.

Cohen, Richard J. (ed.). 2003. Essays on Jaina Art by Ananda Coomaraswamy. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Manohar.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. See Cohen, and Crouch.
–––––––––––––––. 1994. Jaina Art. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Cort, John E. 2010. Framing the Jina. Oxford: University Press.

Crouch, James S. 2002. A Bibliography of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Art and Manohar.

Desai, Kalpana (ed.) 2002. Jewels on the Crescent Masterpieces of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Formerly Prince of Wales Museum of Western India) Mumbai: CSMVS in association with Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Ahmedabad.

Granoff, Phyllis (ed.) 2009. Victorious Ones Jain Images of Perfection. New York: Rubin Museum of Art and Ahmedabad, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad. (This catalogue has the latest extensive bibliography to date for Jain art and iconography).

Howes, Jennifer 2017. “Colin Mackenzie Collector Extraordinaire” Asian Art Newspaper, October 2017: 12-13.
https://asianartnewspaper.com/collector-extraordinaire

Pal, Pratapaditya. 1988. Indian Sculpture vol. 2. (A catalogue of the LACMA Collection), Los Angeles, LACMA and University of California Press.
––––––––––––––. 1994. Jain art from India: the Peaceful Liberators. Exhibition at LACMA. London: Thames and Hudson.
––––––––––––––. 2003. Art of the Indian Subcontinent Asian Art of the Norton Simon Museum vol.1. New Haven and London in association with the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena.
–––––––––––––––. 2011. The Elegant Image: Bronzes from the Indian Subcontinent in the Siddharth L. Bhansali Collection. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art and Mumbai: The Marg Foundation.
–––––––––––––––. 2015. In Pursuit of the Past. Mumbai: The Marg Foundation.
–––––––––––––––. (ed.) 2016. Puja and Piety: Hindu, Jain and Buddhist Art from the Indian Subcontinent. Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art in association with University of California Press.

Roy, Sourindranath 1961. The Story of Indian Archaeology New Delhi: Archeological Survey of India.

Sarkar, H[arivishnu] 1981. Museums and Protection of Monuments and Antiquities in India. Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan