heritage/hastinapur.jpg · 1200×800Hastinapur, on an old bed of the Ganga in Meerut district, was the capital of the Kuru kingdom and is the city of the Mahabharata. B. B. Lal excavated the mound for the Archaeological Survey of India in the early 1950s and found a long, layered occupation, including Painted Grey Ware, which he connected with the epic tradition. For Jains the town matters for another reason: it is a kalyanaka site of three Tirthankaras.
The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth Tirthankaras — Shantinatha, Kunthunatha and Aranatha — were all born here in the Kuru royal line. Each of the three was also a chakravartin, a universal emperor, before he renounced the world; Shantinatha, son of King Vishvasena and Queen Achira of the Ikshvaku house, is remembered as Tirthankara, chakravartin and Kamadeva in a single life. All three attained nirvana far away, on Sammed Shikharji.
Hastinapur is also remembered as the place where Rishabhadeva, after a fast of thirteen months, took his first alms — sugarcane juice offered by King Shreyansa. Jains keep that day as Akshaya Tritiya, and many end long fasts here. The Digambara Bada Mandir was founded in 1801 by Raja Harsukh Rai, treasurer to Emperor Shah Alam II, and consecrated in 1806; the Jambudweep model of Jain cosmology, begun in 1972 under Aryika Gyanmati Mataji, was completed in 1985.
