Ranakpur is a single architectural idea executed at enormous scale over roughly seventy years.
Four faces
The temple is chaumukha, four-faced. The image of Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, is quadruple, facing the four directions, and the building is arranged so that it can be approached and entered from any side.
The scheme signifies the Tirthankara's omnidirectional teaching, and it removes the usual processional axis: there is no single correct way in.
The pillars
Something over fourteen hundred columns of white marble hold up a canopy of domes, and they are said to be individually distinct, no two carved alike.
The claim is repeated everywhere and is not the sort of thing anyone has exhaustively verified, but the variation is real and immediately visible.
The practical effect is what the building is famous for: the columns are arranged so that they never entirely block the view of the central image from anywhere in the hall. Light comes down through the domes and changes through the day, and the interior is never the same twice.
The timeline
Construction began in 1389 and finished around 1458, roughly seventy years, meaning the carvers who finished it were the grandchildren of those who began.
Who paid, and who permitted
The patron was Dharna Shah, a merchant of Ghanerao, said to have been prompted by a vision.
The land and the protection came from Rana Kumbha of Mewar, the Hindu ruler, and the place is named for him.
That pairing, Jain mercantile money, Hindu royal permission, is the ordinary arrangement behind almost every great Jain building, and it is the same structure that produced Dilwara four centuries earlier. A community with wealth and no political power built at scale by attaching itself to rulers who had power and wanted revenue.
No royal cult was attached in return. The kings did not become Jain and were not asked to.
Access
Non-Jain visitors are admitted during set hours, outside the times reserved for worship, with an entry fee and a camera charge set by the Anandji Kalyanji Trust. Leather is not permitted inside.