Humcha

Also Hombuja

The old Santara capital in the Malnad, best known for its Padmavati shrine and its long-established Digambara matha.

The Santara dynasty’s own account of its founding is entangled with the temple: Jinadatta Raya, a Jain prince said to have come from Mathura in the north, is held to have carried an image of Padmavati with him to Humcha and founded both the kingdom and its capital around her shrine. Whatever the founding legend’s exact accuracy, the Bhattaraka seat — the head of the local Digambara institution — was established here by the seventh or eighth century, and Humcha remained a major Jain centre through the sixteenth.

The matha founded then is still active, one of a small number of Digambara Bhattaraka seats to have survived continuously into the present rather than lapsing and being revived, which gives Humcha a living institutional history that most sites in this directory, temple architecture aside, do not carry.

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