Nareli Jain Temple

Also Gyanoday Tirth Kshetra

A large marble complex of twenty-four small shrines, one for each Tirthankara, built on a hillside outside Ajmer in the early twenty-first century.

Construction began in 1994–95 under the blessing of Muni Sudhasagar, a disciple of Acharya Vidyasagar — one of the most consequential Digambara reformist monks of his generation — and took roughly a decade to complete, which makes Nareli a genuinely modern build rather than a restoration or a rebuilding of something older, in a directory where almost everything else is medieval or ancient.

The plan is a central temple ringed by twenty-four smaller shrines climbing the hillside, one for each Tirthankara, in white marble against the Aravallis — a layout that gives a single hill the same complete set the wider directory takes many separate temples and cities to assemble, and shows plainly what a fully resourced contemporary build looks like next to the medieval sites that otherwise dominate this corpus.

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