Mahavir Jayanti

Mahavir Jayanti celebrates the birth of Mahavira (traditionally 599-527 BCE), the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara ("ford-maker") of the present age and the great historical teacher of Jainism, roughly a contemporary of the Buddha. Jain tradition does not regard Mahavira as the founder of a new religion but as the reviver and definitive teacher of the eternal Jain path, following twenty-three Tirthankaras before him; born a prince named Vardhamana, he renounced the world, attained omniscience (kevala jnana) through severe austerity, and taught the discipline of non-violence, non-attachment and self-conquest by which the soul is freed from the bondage of karma. The festival falls on the thirteenth day of the bright fortnight of Chaitra (March-April).

The day is the most widely celebrated of the Jain calendar's joyful festivals, kept by both Svetambara and Digambara communities. Images of Mahavira are ceremonially bathed (abhisheka) and carried in procession (in a chariot, the rath yatra); temples hold special worship and the reading of accounts of his life; and the emphasis on his teaching gives the day a strong charitable and ethical cast, with acts of charity, the release or protection of animals, and abstention from harm. In honouring the teacher who gave Jainism its classical form, Mahavir Jayanti also holds up his life of renunciation and non-violence as the pattern the tradition asks its followers to approach.

Several Indian states observe Mahavir Jayanti as an official gazetted public holiday, and in a number of cities with significant Jain populations, including parts of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, municipal authorities have gone further and mandated the closure of slaughterhouses and, in some cases, restricted the sale of meat and eggs in shops and restaurants for the day, a specific civic accommodation to Jain non-violence principles extended to the entire population of a city or district regardless of individual residents' own religious affiliation or dietary choice.

These closures have occasionally drawn public objection from non-Jain residents and restaurant owners who argue that a civic mandate extending one community's religious dietary restriction to the whole population oversteps what public accommodation of a minority religious observance should require, a live if generally low-key point of friction that surfaces periodically in Indian local politics around Mahavir Jayanti and a small number of other holidays, including some Hindu fasting days, where municipal meat-sale restrictions are imposed on the whole public rather than left to individual observance.

Jain community organisations in many Indian cities also use Mahavir Jayanti as an occasion for blood donation camps and, in some cases, drives promoting eye and organ donation pledges, framing these modern medical forms of giving as a contemporary expression of the same ahimsa and compassion for living beings that the day's animal-release customs and charitable giving have expressed in more traditional forms for centuries.