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ART AND ARCHITECTURE
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The ancient city of Mathurā was for centuries one of the greatest centres of the Jainas and their flourishing establishment in that place seems to have had a continued history from about the second century B.C. to the 12th century A.D. The sculptured treasures, yielded by the site, remarkable equally for their variety as well as numbers, are of the greatest aesthetic and iconographic value.
Specimens of Jaina icons and other religious sculptures from Rajgir, Vidisa, Kahāun, Deograh, Chanderi, Khajuraho and other places in northern India, and from different parts of Bengal, Orissa, Saurashtra, Maharashtra, Andhra, Karnataka and the Tamil countries, belonging to the first millennium of the Christian era, also speak eloquently of the development of the art of sculpture at the hands of the Jainas. Even during the medieval period, notwithstanding the iconoclastic zeal of the Muslim rulers and other unfavourable circumstances, the icon-making activity of the Jainas does not appear to have abated noticeably. In one year alone, in the last decade of the 15th century, thousands of marble images of the Tirtharkaras were consecrated and sent out by cart-loads to different parts of the subcontinent.
And, it is to this period that the wonderful Jaina colossi belong, the earliest and most celebrated of them being the one at Sravanabelgola carved out about the beginning of the last quarter of the tenth century A.D. In the words of Heinrich Zimmer, "It is human in shape and feature, yet as inhuman as an icicle; and this expresses perfectly the idea of successful withdrawal from the round of life and death, personal cares, individual destiny, desires, sufferings and events." Another connoisseur speaks of it as " A statue solid set, and moulded in colossal calm"; and Walhouse says, "This is one of those colossal statues that are found in this part of the country, statues truly Egyptain in size, and unrivalled throughout India was detached works... Nude, cut from a single mass of granite, darkened by
