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The latter image, which portrays the Jina sheltered by his attendant deity Dharanendra, is typically highlighted in the scholarship as it presents the serpent king in semi-human form rather than as a canopy of cobra hoods over the Jina's head. A photograph of this same relief (with adjacent carvings) represents the site of Kalugumalai in Hegewald's (2009: 490) survey and it serves as the primary illustration in the front of Sivaramamurti's (1983: 11) Panorama of Jain Art where it is described as one of the finest examples of sculpture depicting this Jina. In addition, a line drawing of the Pārsvanatha relief is found on the cover of Dhaky's (1997) edited volume Arhat Pārsva and Dharanendra Nexus. Indeed, this particular image has become an icon for the site itself.
While the uniqueness and beauty of this image cannot be contested, its privileged presentation in these publications precludes an in-depth understanding of its larger visual and spatial context. As I will discuss in more detail below, the Parsvanatha relief is in fact only one of nearly twenty-five images carved on the surface of that particular rock formation. Thus, even in studies that recognize the contributions of Kalugumalai in terms of its sculpture, the way the images are examined as isolated reliefs denies any sense of a "power of place" and how the images and their boulders collectively define Jain sacred space. I argue here that acknowledging Kalugumalai exclusively as a repository of sculpture severely limits our understanding of how these monuments functioned as clear and permanent statements of Jain presence and devotional practice in medieval Tamil Nadu. In this essay, I explore how sacred space is defined at Kalugumalai through its five groups of boulder-reliefs that both correspond and depart from Jain carvings located in more "traditional" examples of rock-cut architecture. The nuanced connections between the ways that these two types of monuments demarcate devotional space suggest that we need to abandon art historical categories of "architecture" and "sculpture" and consider how sacred space and power of place is expressed through more complex visual systems.
Examining Kalugumalai
In order to address the ways that sacred space is defined at Kalugumalai through its imagery, it is necessary to first describe the physical characteristics of the site and the arrangement of its approximately one hundred and fifty relief-carvings. Unlike structural and rock-cut temples that clearly transform the environment from a natural landscape to one dominated by a man-made structure, the boulder site of Kalugumalai highlights the irregularities of the rocky terrain. The reliefs are incised on various rock formations that
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