Jainism at Mathura and the Kankali Tila

The ancient city of Mathura, on the Yamuna river in modern Uttar Pradesh, was one of the great religious and artistic centres of early India, and it holds a special place in Jain history through the archaeological site known as Kankali Tila. Excavated in the late nineteenth century, this mound yielded an extraordinary quantity of Jain sculpture, architectural fragments and inscriptions spanning several centuries, making it one of the richest sources for understanding early Jain worship and community life.

The Jain remains from Kankali Tila range in date from around the second or first century BCE through the Kushan period and into the Gupta era, documenting continuous Jain activity at Mathura for perhaps seven or eight centuries. The finds include images of Tirthankaras, votive tablets, pillars, railings and, most distinctively, a class of carved stone slabs known as ayagapatas, or tablets of homage, which were set up for veneration and often bear auspicious symbols and inscriptions.

These ayagapatas are among the most important objects for reconstructing early Jain religion. Combining figural representations of Tirthankaras with symbolic motifs such as the wheel, the auspicious symbols, and stupas, they show a devotional practice in which both aniconic symbols and anthropomorphic images of the Jinas were venerated together. Some depict a Jain stupa, indicating that, like Buddhists, early Jains built and worshipped at stupas, a practice largely forgotten in later tradition and known chiefly through these Mathura finds.

The inscriptions on the Mathura material are especially valuable to historians. Many record donations by lay devotees, including merchants and, notably, a large number of women, and they frequently name the donor's teacher and monastic lineage. These records preserve the names of numerous ganas, kulas and shakhas, the branches and sub-branches of the monastic community, several of which correspond to lineages listed in a Svetambara text, the Kalpasutra. This correspondence provides rare independent confirmation of the reliability of the Jain literary tradition regarding its early monastic organisation.

The Mathura sculptures also illuminate the state of the community before and around the time of the great schism. The images and inscriptions do not always align neatly with the later rigid division between Digambara and Svetambara, and some scholars see in them evidence of a period when the distinctions were still fluid. The prominence of ascetic lineages, the involvement of the laity, and the flourishing of donative religion all emerge vividly from the record.

Artistically, the Jain sculpture of Mathura belongs to the celebrated Mathura school, which worked in a distinctive spotted red sandstone and produced some of the earliest anthropomorphic religious images in India for Jains, Buddhists and Brahmanical cults alike. The Jain Tirthankara image, seated or standing in meditation with its serene expression and auspicious markings, took on at Mathura many of the iconographic conventions that would define it for all subsequent centuries.

Today the finds from Kankali Tila are preserved chiefly in the Government Museum at Mathura and the Lucknow museum. They constitute an irreplaceable archive of early Jain devotion, art and community organisation, showing a confident, well-endowed and socially diverse Jain population thriving at the heart of northern India in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era.