Gujarat sits where the Indian landmass meets the Arabian Sea, and its religious composition reflects a coastline that has been in continuous long-distance trade for three thousand years.
It holds one of the largest Jain populations in India, together with two of the tradition's principal pilgrimage landscapes: Palitana, where several hundred temples cover the ridges of Shatrunjaya hill, and Girnar, a mountain associated with the twenty-second Tirthankara. Jain merchant families in the region funded temple building, manuscript libraries and the copying of the canon on a scale that preserved a great deal of the literature.
It is also where the Zoroastrians who left Iran after the Arab conquest settled and became the Parsi community, according to their own traditional account landing at Sanjan and receiving permission to stay on conditions. The sacred fire that community maintains at Udvada is held to have been kept burning continuously since it was consecrated, and Parsi religious life in India developed its own institutions while remaining in contact with the Zoroastrians who stayed in Iran.
Krishna devotion centres on Dwarka on the western tip, described in the Mahabharata as his city. The Pushtimarg tradition founded by Vallabhacharya, with its distinctive service of the image as an honoured guest, has been strongest among Gujarati merchant families, and travelled with them to East Africa, Britain and North America.