Shravanabelagola

The Bahubali at Shravanabelagola is seventeen metres of granite carved in place, and once every twelve years several hundred thousand people come to pour things over it.

Bahubali

The figure is not a Tirthankara. Bahubali was the son of the first Tirthankara, Rishabhanatha, and fought his brother Bharata for their father's kingdom.

He won, and at the moment of victory renounced everything, including the kingdom he had just taken. He then stood in meditation so long that creepers grew up his legs and anthills formed at his feet.

The statue shows exactly that: a standing figure, arms at his sides, creepers winding up the legs. The story's point is that the renunciation, not the victory, is the achievement.

Why he is naked

The nudity is doctrine, and it is the thing that separates the two Jain orders.

Digambara, "sky-clad", holds that a fully renounced ascetic possesses nothing whatever, clothing included, and that liberation is not attainable while one owns a garment. Svetambara, "white-clad", holds that ascetics wear simple white cloth, and that women can attain liberation, which Digambara denies.

Shravanabelagola is Digambara throughout, and the naked colossus is the doctrine made visible at scale.

The date

An inscription at the base dates the image to 981, commissioned by Chavundaraya, a general of the Western Ganga kings, and set up for his mother.

That is a firmer date than almost any Indian monument of comparable age can offer, and it comes with a named patron and a stated motive.

The Mahamastakabhisheka

Once every twelve years the head-anointing is performed.

Scaffolding is raised to the crown of the statue. From the platform above, the figure is anointed in sequence with water, milk, sugarcane juice, saffron paste, sandalwood, turmeric, vermilion and finally gold and silver flowers and coins, poured over the head by thousands of people in turn, in pots, while hundreds of thousands watch from the hillside below.

The last was in February 2018. The next falls in 2030.

It is described as the eighty-eighth in a sequence beginning in 981. That count belongs to the tradition rather than to the arithmetic of an unbroken twelve-year cycle, and should be read as such.

The inscriptions

The two hills carry more than eight hundred inscriptions, recording donations, endowments and deaths between roughly the sixth century and the nineteenth.

Many record sallekhana, the Jain practice of voluntary fasting to death undertaken by those who judge their life to be ending, a substantial epigraphic record of a practice that is otherwise mostly known from texts, and which remains legally contested in India.

The statue anointed every twelve years depicts a man who is said to have stood so still in meditation that plants grew up his own legs.

Standing until vines took hold

Jain tradition holds that Bahubali, son of the first Tirthankara Rishabhanatha, stood in unmoving meditation for so long seeking enlightenment that climbing vines grew up around his legs and arms, and birds nested undisturbed in his hair, a story the statue directly depicts through carved vines and creatures on its limbs.

A single block of granite

The monolithic statue, standing some fifty-seven feet tall, was carved from a single mass of granite around 981 CE, commissioned by Chavundaraya, a general and minister serving the Ganga dynasty, an undertaking on a scale that placed Shravanabelagola among the most ambitious single-statue projects in the premodern world.

The anointing itself

The Mahamastakabhisheka, held roughly once every twelve years, involves pouring milk, water, saffron paste, sandalwood and other substances over the statue from specially constructed scaffolding reaching its head, drawing enormous crowds of Jain pilgrims for a ceremony whose long interval between occurrences is itself part of what gives each performance its significance.