Babu Amichand Panalal Adishwarji Temple

Mumbai’s best-known Jain temple, on Malabar Hill, its walls and ceilings painted with scenes from the lives of the Tirthankaras.

Walkeshwar, the Malabar Hill neighbourhood the temple stands in, takes its own name from a Shiva shrine and has long been one of the city’s more affluent quarters — a setting that shows in the temple’s scale and finish, larger than most Jain temples elsewhere in Mumbai, its main gate flanked by two carved stone elephants.

Built in 1904 and dedicated to Adinatha, the temple is known chiefly for how much of its interior surface is painted rather than left bare: the dome carries zodiac and celestial motifs, and the walls run through tableaux of scenes from Jain scripture alongside images of other Tirthankaras beside the central Adinatha image — the same instinct for narrative decoration that this directory’s much older Tiruparuttikunram carries in stone-hall paintings a world away in style and half a millennium earlier in date.

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