Ahinsa Sthal

A seated Mahavira in granite on a low hill in Mehrauli, raised in 1980 as a monument to non-violence.

The temple sits in Mehrauli, near the Qutb complex — old Delhi’s dense layering of monuments from every era the city has passed through — and is, by comparison, recent: founded in 1980 as a dedicated Jain space among neighbours far older, its name meaning simply "place of non-violence."

The image is a single granite Mahavira in lotus posture, thirteen and a half feet tall and around thirty tonnes, carved at Karkala on Karnataka’s coast — the same quarrying town, and by extension the same stone tradition, that supplied the 1973 Bahubali colossus at Dharmasthala. A temple in the capital and a hillside shrine sixteen hundred kilometres south share more of their material history than their settings suggest.

Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.