Moving mountains: tracing the history, creation and meaning of Jain sacred-site images (tirtha pata)
Creators: name: Folan, Lucie
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2024

description: This thesis presents the first detailed object-based art-historical survey of the Jain tirtha pata art form. Defined as two-dimensional images (pata) of sacred sites (tirtha), these works of art have been used for religious purposes in the Svetambara Murtipujak subsect of India's Jain religion since the fifteenth century or earlier. Varying in materials, styles, and representational strategies, they depict monuments, landscapes, spiritual figures, narratives, and practices related to places that are believed to assist souls to attain spiritual release from the cycle of mortality. Tirtha pata are regarded as incarnations (avatara) of these sites and credited with the same potential. Large cartographic paintings of tirtha, especially Mount Satrunjaya in Gujarat, are traditionally displayed to facilitate emotional or mental pilgrimages (bhava yatra) of equivalent merit to actual journeys. This practice has become an important way for the community to express its beliefs, connections with place, and cultural identity. Despite evident ongoing significance, tirtha pata are under-researched. Examples are typically explained generically, with limited reference to Svetambara Murtipujak beliefs, and there is no collection or publication representing their full scope. Reliance on a small data set has caused academics to oversimplify the arc of the tradition. This thesis addresses this gap in scholarship. It is based on over 150 tirtha pata of the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries from public, private and temple collections in and outside India, the largest compilation to date. I interpret these works using information from Jain texts, related art objects, studies of Svetambara Murtipujak Jainism, interviews with contemporary tirtha-pata artists, and observation of bhava-yatra ceremonies. My theories and techniques derive from multiple disciplines: art history, curatorship, material-culture studies, and cartography. My study situates tirtha pata within the worldview of Svetambara Murtipujak Jainism and its sacred-site traditions. It then focuses on examples from defined periods, expanding knowledge of the types of images produced, their characteristics, meanings, influences, functions, and psychosocial effects. Through object-based case studies, I recover information about past and present artists, patrons, audiences, and production contexts. This research highlights the documentary value of the art form by revealing links between individual tirtha pata and historical figures, events, and issues. Assessing the works collectively, I demonstrate how they chart physical changes to sacred sites, and continuities and evolution in site-based narratives, hierarchies, and pilgrimage practices. By historicising the types and uses of tirtha pata, I challenge their positioning as generic instruments of static religious practices and propose new theories about the trajectories of the art form and the inculcation of bhava yatra into Svetambara Murtipujak ritual culture. Throughout the thesis, I argue that tirtha pata have been shaped by material and social forces as part of Jainism's long history of identity-building and place-making. My research demonstrates how the works have helped build community cohesion among the religion's geographically dispersed populations, especially when distance, persecution, unrest, and ownership disputes have hindered access to sacred sites. Tracing the 600-year history of the thematic art form helps safeguard knowledge of an important living tradition at the intersection of Indian art, history, religion, and culture.