Shauripur

Held by tradition to be the birthplace of Neminatha, the twenty-second Tirthankara, on the Yamuna near Bateshwar.

Shauripur sits a short distance from Bateshwar, a Yamuna-bank village otherwise known for a line of over a hundred Shiva temples raised by an eighteenth-century Bhadauri ruler — the two shrines a walk apart, one Jain and ancient, one Shaiva and comparatively recent, sharing the same stretch of riverbank rather than competing for it.

The place-name itself carries a further, older thread: the epic tradition identifies Shauripur with the city of King Surasena, and by extension with Krishna’s ancestral line — the Yadava dynasty that gives Neminatha, born a cousin of Krishna in the Jain account, his own kinship to that epic’s central family.

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