Jivaraj Papriwal

Jivaraja Paprival, was the legendary installer of as many as 100,000 Jain images in 15th century, now found in Jain temples all over India. He was a trader in the Rajasthani town of Mudasa in 15th century.

India was overrun during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by Turkish invaders. The two centuries following became a period of great devastation in North India. Temples were demolished and idols were defaced. Very few new images could be installed. Temple images had marked the tradition and identity of the Jain congregations, but very few were left.

Paprival resolved that regardless the circumstances, the financial cost, and the fierce political climate he would find a way to install as many images of Lord Jina as may be needed by Jain communities residing in towns and villages situated anywhere in all India. He commissioned large teams of workers to cut slabs of marble from several quarries and employed armies of craftsmen to carve the images. So many idols were created that stories abound on how fast the inscribers had to work to carve the traditional dedicatory inscription into the base of each murti.

On an auspicious day in 1491, Bhattaraka [V. Johrapurkar, Bhattaraka Sampradaya, 1958. ] Jinachandra Deva of Mula Sangh supervised a grand pratishtha or consecration of all the images, the magnitude of which had never been seen before and will likely never be reached again. To count the actual number of those idols today would be a mind-boggling task. Some estimates place it around 100,000 [Y.K. Malaiya, “On the Shoulders of Giants” In Three Days’ Journey into Self, YJA, Los Angeles, 2000.] .

Jivaraja, with an enormous train of carts, then embarked on a pilgrimage to nearly all the Jain Tirthas of India. Braving the possibility of hostile confrontations with the iconoclastic invaders, wherever shravakas along the way lacked an idol he simply had one or more images installed. In our own times, in Punjab, Haryana, Bengal, Bihar, Bundelkhand, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka, we can visit the images installed by Jivaraja in temples of both the Digambar and Shvetambar sects. Each statue is one to two feet high, composed mostly of white marble but with a few blue, black and green hues, and inscribed with a text mentioning Jivaraja Papdival.

Today, in thousands of Jain communities all over India, the shravakas once again possess beautiful and intact symbols of the faith thanks to Jivaraja’s audacity and vision. Since then, the Indian state of Rajasthan has been the major carving center for Jain idols.

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* Khandelwal

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