Because of the Svetambara claim, Mallinatha is the figure most often cited in modern discussion of gender within Jainism, of the tradition's long, internal argument over whether a woman may attain liberation, an argument the two branches answer differently and that the Malli story crystallises. Scholars treat the divergence as a window onto the doctrinal and social history of the communities rather than as a matter to be settled.
Mallinatha is venerated by both branches, as a woman by the Svetambara, as a man by the Digambara, as a fully liberated soul and omniscient ford-maker, and is held to have attained final liberation at Sammeta Shikhar (Shikharji). Like the other ford-makers of the present avasarpini, the figure belongs to Jain sacred history rather than to the documented past.
The Svetambara scripture that preserves the fullest form of the story, the Jnatadharmakatha, relates that Malli, having been born a princess and sought by several kings as a bride, had a hollow golden image of her own likeness made, its cavity filled daily with the remains of the food she ate; when her rejected suitors were shown the image after weeks of rotting inside it, she used the stench and corruption of what was once fresh to teach them the impermanence of physical beauty, and renounced the world at their assembled realisation of the point.