The Sammed Shikharji Vandana

In 2019 the government of Jharkhand issued a notification that treated Parasnath Hill as a tourism and eco-tourism destination. What followed is the clearest recent statement by a religious community anywhere about the commercial treatment of a sacred place, and then a second statement, by a different community, that almost nobody outside India reported.

Why the hill

Twenty of the twenty-four tirthankaras are held to have attained moksha on this ridge. By that count it is the holiest place in Jainism, above any temple. Pilgrims climb barefoot before dawn and walk about 27 km over the top, visiting the tonks that mark each liberation, and come down the same day; the strict take neither food nor water for the whole of it.

The protest

Jain organisations across India objected, and did not do so quietly. There were marches in several cities, sustained public campaigning, and hunger strikes, in the course of which at least one monk died. The argument made was narrow and specific, and worth stating exactly: a place where liberation from rebirth occurred cannot simultaneously be a leisure destination, because the two uses of the ground are not compatible. Not that tourists should behave better. That the designation itself was the harm.

The central government intervened and the notification was suspended in January 2023.

What was left out

The hill is also Marang Buru, the great mountain, to the Santhal, one of the largest Adivasi communities in India, whose relationship to it long predates the Jain shrines and who worship there.

When the settlement was reached between the Jain organisations and the state, Santhal groups protested in turn, on the grounds that their claim had not been part of the negotiation at all. That protest received a fraction of the coverage. The dispute is not resolved, and the shape of it, a well-organised religious minority with national reach securing a settlement, and an Adivasi community with an older claim finding it had not been in the room, is a familiar one in Indian sacred-site politics.

The palanquins

One further internal argument, since it bears on the walk itself. Pilgrims who cannot climb are carried up in doli palanquins by hired porters, drawn from the local, largely Adivasi, population. The conditions, the loads and the pay are criticised within the Jain community as well as outside it, and the practice sits awkwardly against a tradition whose first principle is non-harm.

The commercial placement flag on this route is set to no, and the reason is not an inference. The community organised nationally to stop this hill being treated as a destination and the government backed down. It has already answered the question.

Jain sacred geography is counted rather than ranked by size, and Parasnath Hill carries the highest count there is: twenty of the twenty four tirthankaras of this cycle are held to have attained moksha here. That arithmetic, and not any building, is what makes it the holiest place in Jainism for both major traditions.

The shrines on the hill are tonks, small structures marking each liberation, and most contain not an image in the ordinary sense but charan paduka, carved footprints. The pilgrim's circuit runs roughly twenty seven kilometres over the ridge, visiting the tonks in sequence, and it is walked barefoot, since footwear on the hill is prohibited. Pilgrims start well before dawn and come down the same day, and the strict observe it without food or water throughout, which in that heat and over that distance is the substance of the vandana rather than an embellishment.

Those who cannot walk are carried in dolis by hired porters. What the porters are paid, and whether a practice of liberation should depend on men carrying pilgrims up a mountain for a day's wage, is argued about within the community and is not a criticism made only from outside.

Both Digambara and Svetambara traditions claim the hill and maintain their own arrangements on it, and the relationship between them, and between both and the state administration, has produced repeated litigation.

The site also draws practitioners of sallekhana, the vow of fasting to death undertaken at the end of life, which Jain teaching distinguishes carefully from suicide and which Indian courts have considered. The atlas records that this occurs at the site and does not describe how it is undertaken.