Bhadreshwar Jain Temple

Also Vasai Jain Temple

A very old Kutch tirtha, severely damaged in the 2001 earthquake and rebuilt largely from its own recovered stone.

How old Bhadreshwar actually is depends entirely on which source is asked, and the range is wide enough to be worth stating rather than picking from: a nineteenth-century chronicle, the Bantvijaya, dates the site to 516 BCE under a Raja Siddhasen; a separate legendary account has a layman named Devchandra laying its foundation a mere forty-five years after Mahavira’s death; and other sources call the standing temple roughly a thousand years old, with the site beneath it older still. None of these is independently evidenced, and the temple’s own claim to real antiquity rests more safely on what is not disputed: that some structure stood here through the Kutch earthquakes of 1819, 1844–45 and 1875, each time repaired by the same line of Kutchi master masons.

The 2001 Bhuj earthquake did what those earlier ones had not: the temple was damaged past the point safety inspectors would allow it to stand, and it was demolished and rebuilt rather than repaired again, largely from its own recovered stone. What stands at Bhadreshwar today is, by the site’s own account, a reconstruction — not a restoration — of what an earthquake ended.

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