On the auspicious occasion of Mahavir Jayanti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Samrat Samprati Museum, known in Gujarati as the Samrat Samprati Sangrahalaya, on the serene Koba Tirth campus in Gandhinagar. To visit it is to step inside two and a half millennia of living faith. Koba Tirth, formally the Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra, already draws pilgrims from across India. The new museum transforms it into something broader still: a destination for travellers with even a passing curiosity about South Asian history, philosophy or the remarkable civilisation that grew up alongside and sometimes in conversation with the Mauryan empire.
Acharya Padmasagar Surishwarji, a Jain monk conceived the museum and spent years gathering the rare artefacts now assembled within its walls. The collection he has bequeathed to posterity numbers more than 2,000 objects, arranged chronologically across seven wings. Visitors enter through an introduction to the two foundational tenets of Jainism: ahimsa, the principle of non-violence and aparigraha, non-possessiveness.
Pride of place among the early galleries belongs to artefacts associated with the 24 Tirthankaras. A highlight is a Jina Matruka Patta — a marble slab depicting the Tirthankaras reclining on their mothers’ laps. Spot stone idols in sandstone, schist, granite and marble span a range, from the 2nd century BCE to the 16th century CE. The celebrated Vasantagadh hoard, dated to between the 7th and 9th centuries CE, provides one of the collection’s most historically significant episodes. Alongside it sit examples of pancha dhatu idols while palm-leaf texts share cases with paper manuscripts, miniature paintings and more.