Trilokyanatha Temple

Also Jina Kanchi

The Jain Kanchi, on the far bank of the Vegavati, carrying Vijayanagara-period ceiling paintings of the lives of the Tirthankaras.

Kanchipuram is remembered chiefly as a Shaiva and Vaishnava temple city, one of the seven traditionally held to grant liberation in Hindu pilgrimage — which makes Tiruparuttikunram, its Jain counterpart across the Vegavati river, easy to miss even though its own history runs back to the Pallava era and forward through substantial Vijayanagara-period rebuilding. The double name records the split plainly: Jina Kanchi against the larger Kanchi across the water.

What survives from the Vijayanagara additions is the temple’s rarest feature — ceiling paintings in the Sangita Mandapa narrating the lives of the Tirthankaras, among the very few painted Jain narrative cycles to survive anywhere in south India. They are also the most fragile thing in this directory’s temple photography: the temple keeps the hall deliberately dim to slow the fading, which is why so few clear photographs of the paintings exist at all.

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