Mahavira Jain Vidyalay Suvarna Mahotsav Granth Part 1

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 849

350 SHRI MAHAVIRA JAINA VIDYALAYA GOLDEN JUBILEE VOLUME
were written by and for the Jainas. This shows that the Jaina monks in the middle ages were not narrow-minded communalists, but fully realised the importance of libraries preserving the literature of all the faiths. In that way they acted as the torch-bearers of Indian culture in the middle ages.
The Jnana-Bhandara is a peculiarly Jaina institution. The JñanaBhandaras of Svetambara Jainas appear all over the Gujarat, Rajasthan, Malwa and Delhi-Agra (U. P.) region. The Digambara Jainas too had their Jñana-Bhandaras mostly confined to Delhi-Agra and Rajasthan but also extending as far as Karanja near Nagpur and as far South as Mudabidri in Mysore. The most important of the Svetämbara Bhaṇḍāras are situated at Patan, Cambay, Jesalmere, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Idar, Surat, Kaccha, Chanasma, Limdi, Chhani, etc. These contain important collections of manuscripts on both palm-leaf and paper.
Inspite of this richness of the Bhandaras the important pictorial material which they contained was for a long time not available to scholars. However, in the first quarter of the twentieth century a part of it was acquired from private collections, and was made available to scholars through the indefatigable efforts of Glassenap and Coomaraswamy. The latter published his Catalogue of Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Part IV, dealing with Jaina paintings of Western Indian origin. It opened a new field of study in which participated a number of scholars including W. Norman Brown, N. C. Mehta, Muni Śri Punyavijayji, O. C. Ganguly, Ajit Ghosh, S. M. Nawab, M. R. Majmudar, Motichandra, U. P. Shah, Pramod Chandra. and others. However, in the beginning such efforts were naturally quite sporadic. The fault did not lie with the scholars. The difficulties were entirely due to the non-availability of sufficient material.
In 1935, however, due to the joint efforts of Muni Sri Punyavijayaji and Sarabhai Nawab, Jaina Citrakalpadruma, Vol.I was published, in Gujarati, for the first time. A large number of illustrated manuscripts on cloth, palm-leaf and paper, hidden away in the inaccessible Jñana-Bhandaras were introduced to the students of Indian art. work supplemented the pioneer work of Coomaraswamy and W. Norman Brown in this field. Since then illustrated manuscripts are turning up
5 In 1913, Hutteman published Miniatures from the Kalpa-sutra in his Miniaturen-Zum-Jinacarita, Baessler Archiv, Band II, heft 2. In 1914, Coomaraswamy published his Notes on Jaina Art, in Journal of Indian Art and Industry, Vol. 16, pp. 81 ff & plates.