This panel examines pilgrimage in Jain traditions, a domain marked by material, legal, and experiential complexity. Pilgrimage serves as both a practice and a lens for understanding how religious communities imagine and construct futures amid marginalisation and uncertainty. The panel foregrounds pilgrimage as a site where futures are imagined through environmental stewardship, managerial modernity, legal restructuring, and dispositional cultivation, revealing Jain traditions as adaptive, contested, and generative across India. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, textual analysis, and material culture, it highlights the adaptation of Jain traditions to challenges such as industrialisation, legal reforms, and diaspora mobility. Four papers examine: reclamation of a Jain landscape in Tamil Nadu, and emergence of travel writing from local pilgrimage practices; reinvention of merchant masculinity through contemporary pilgrimage organisation; condensation of colonial-era territorial authority into a guardian deity at Śikharajī; and the possibility of pilgrimage performed entirely through cultivated inner disposition, without a physical journey.
A Jain anti-animal sacrifice activist stumbling over an overgrown ancient sacred site and kick- starting a whole new genre of travel writing. A remote hilltop rock temple dedicated to Āṭinātar-Ṛṣabha turning into the central pilgrimage site for the Jains of the Tamil-speaking region. An anti-mining protest event sparking the creation of ecologically inspired walks across the Jain landscape of the hills surrounding Madurai. This talk will take these three moments in the history of the Jain community of the Tamil-speaking region to reflect on visions for the reclaiming of spaces that help re-create a Jain landscape out of a scenario of marginalisation, destruction, and endangerment. The remembered, imagined, and projected voyage up the mountain will confront both larger historical practices of Jain pilgrimage and concrete cases of reconfiguration in a period crucial for the transformation of the diverse communities practising Jainism in contemporary Tamil Nadu.
Contemporary Jain laymen take great pride in their organisation of pilgrimages. To plan a pilgrimage is to partake in the actions associated with the great saṅghpatis of old, whose lavish and extraordinary pilgrimage arrangements are the stuff of legend. But even for lower-middle and middle-class Jain laymen, saṅghpati narratives create a template of Jain masculinity from which Jain laymen draw inspiration for their choice of Jain participation. Contemporary laymen used this term in the abstract to describe men who led pilgrimages and made arrangements for Jain processions. The saṅghpati illuminates the merchant skills of diplomacy, management and organisation, knowledge of resources, maintaining a network of connections, and strategic planning. But these skills matter not just for garnering the coveted status as a saṅghpati but also as a mark of masculine leadership and management skills. Thus, Jain pilgrimage provides a site for the creation of a new form of saṅghpati.
This paper examines the emergence of Bhomiyā Jī Mahārāja, the guardian deity at the foothill of Śikharajī (Pārasnātha Hill), and situates his worship within longer histories of landholding, protection, and mediated access to the mountain. While Śikharajī is the most revered Jain tīrtha, sanctified by the liberation of twenty tīrthaṅkaras, ascent has historically required negotiation with territorial authorities. Drawing on colonial revenue records, court cases, Jain tīrthamālā literature, and vernacular pamphlets, the paper traces how guardianship shifted from the Bhuiyan Raja of Palganj under the ghatwālī tenure system to institutional Jain trusts in the colonial and postcolonial periods. I argue that Bhomiyā Jī does not replace earlier intermediaries but condenses their functions into a divine form. His shrine materialises structural continuities in authority even as legal regimes transformed property, sovereignty, and recognition, foregrounding questions of Adivasi dispossession and sacred access.
The paper examines how, for Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jains, a tīrthayātrā (pilgrimage) can be performed through bhāva ('cultivated action-disposition') without visiting a physical tīrthakṣetra—a practice called bhāvayātrā. This is often undertaken using a tīrtha paṭa, an abstract cartographic map of pilgrimage places. The paper explores the semantic and phenomenological dimensions of bhāva. It particularly examines how bhāva operates as an enabler of learning, cultivation, and dispositional transformation in practice and how it constitutes actions. It also examines how tīrtha paṭa allows realisation of place without physical presence. Analysing the Caityavandana Sūtras, contemporary Gujarati Jain texts, and practitioners’ oral histories to frame bhāvayātrā, the paper challenges reductive translations of bhāva as ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’ and reconstrues it as ‘cultivated action-disposition’. It argues that bhāvayātrā enables pilgrims to reconfigure their dispositions towards the qualities of tīrthaṅkaras, foregrounding bhāva as a generative category for understanding tīrthayātrā in the Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaka Jain tradition.