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68 : Śramaņa, Vol 64, No. 1, Jan.-Mar. 2013 the Brahminical order. The social meaning of rituals reflects in the sense of gender hierarchies as well. Within the Jain community this issue was very much a usual recasting of ideal and virtuous woman, who sacrifices for her husband and her family. A seventeenth century popular text Śrī Śrīpāla Rājā no Rāsa cites an ancient epic story that how woman could become agency to use rituals for the purpose of healing in the story. In the story Maināsundarī was married by her father to the leper, Śrīpāla, as punishment for her suggestion that it is karma and not her father that would determine her fate. After marriage, Maināsundari continued her Jain devotion, adding the new practice of worshipping a symbolic representation of all that was worshipful for Jains (siddhacakra). This worship healed Śrīpāla and seven hundred other lepers. Śrīpāla leamt to perform Siddhacakra worship from Maināsundarī, and his worship led to his great wealth and general well-being. For Jain laywomen, Maināsundarī remains the perfectly devoted wife whose religious practices are performed for the well-being of her husband. She is credited with the miraculous cure of her husband's leprosy, as she taught her husband how to perform worship to the Siddhacakra." Siddhacakra worship has become an orthodox means of gaining familial well being and see Maināsundarī and Śrīpāla as the archetypal married couple. But the gendered hierarchies of a father deciding the worst fate for her daughter by marrying her to a leper and the eventual remedy to heal not just the physical condition of the husband but the familial and social well being as well, does not show Maināsundarī in command of the situation at all. She had to follow her father's dictum and ultimately her husband got the material benefit of the ritualistic healing. Maināsundari could just register her role for the future conditioning of a virtuous and dedicated Jain wife.
Rituals also remained a platform to assess the superiority between the two power centres of religious and political authorities. The issues of patronage and the moral supremacy of the religious authorities revolved around the conduct of rituals and miracles. Two inscriptions of eleventh and twelfth centuries from śravanvelagola
