Bahubali Kumbhoj

A twenty-eight-foot Bahubali on a hill in southern Maharashtra, with a teaching institution and dispensary grown up around it.

Kumbhoj had a Bahubali on this hillock long before 1963: an earlier image, some six feet tall, was installed here in 1156 under the guidance of the Digambara monk Shrutasagar. The modern twenty-eight-foot colossus that gives the site its present name stands apart from that older figure, on the same hill but built eight centuries later, as a distinct addition rather than a replacement.

What has grown up around the statue since is closer to an institution than a shrine: a teaching and residential complex serving the wider Digambara community of southern Maharashtra, at the base of a hill reached by around fifty steps — modest by the standard of the coastal Karnataka climbs, but enough to separate the newer colossus from the older image and the settlement below.

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