Gopipura Jain Temples

A cluster of temples in Surat’s old Gopipura quarter, built by the city’s Jain merchant families during its years as a major trading port.

Gopipura was the innermost, most secure quarter of walled Surat from the Mughal era on, and it drew exactly the communities such a quarter would: Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Parsis and foreign traders from Armenia, Arabia and Europe, sharing one dense neighbourhood built around the port’s trade. As the city’s Jain, Khatri and Bohra merchant families grew wealthier, their houses grew with them, and the temples that anchored the quarter’s Jain community grew alongside the houses.

The Umarwadi Parshvanath Derasar, generally reckoned Surat’s oldest surviving Jain temple, is one of the 108 traditionally recognised Parshvanatha shrines and centres on a white marble image of him. The Suvidhinath temple in Desai Pol, installed in 1793 by a local benefactor, holds 225 old images together with murals depicting 108 pilgrimage sites — a single temple built, in effect, as a portable map of the wider Jain pilgrimage landscape, for a merchant community whose trade routes did not always leave time for the journeys themselves.

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