The Sculptors, the Jains and the Contested Ground

Mathura was one of the two great workshop cities of the Kushan empire in the early centuries of the common era, and its mottled red sandstone travelled as far as the northwest. Its carvers produced some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form, alongside Jain votive tablets, Hindu deities and portrait statues of the Kushan kings, often from the same yards, so the school stands as evidence that one craft tradition served several religions at once rather than dividing along them. A Jain council was held at Mathura, traditionally under Arya Skandila, to recover and settle the Svetambara scriptures after famine had scattered the community, and the recension it produced is one of the two that the later council at Valabhi had to reconcile. The modern city is better known for a dispute.

The Katra Keshav Dev complex, held to stand on the prison site, adjoins the Shahi Idgah mosque built in the seventeenth century, and litigation seeking possession of the mosque ground has continued for decades. The Places of Worship Act of 1991 froze the religious character of such sites as they stood at independence, with the Ayodhya case expressly excluded from it, and how far that statute applies at Mathura is precisely what the current suits are about. The atlas records the claim and the statute rather than adjudicating between them.