Basadi

The basadi is the Jain temple in the Digambara usage of Karnataka and the Deccan, and its name and its images alike carry the distinct character of the southern, sky-clad tradition.

Dwelling and shrine

The word derives from vasati, a dwelling, and originally denoted the lodging attached to a temple where wandering ascetics could stay, which records the link between the temple and the mendicants it served. The basadi houses images of the Tirthankaras carved in the Digambara manner, unclothed and unadorned, with downcast inlaid-free eyes, expressing the total renunciation that the Digambara position holds essential, in visible contrast to the ornamented images of the Svetambara derasar.

The southern heartland

The basadi is the temple form of the Jain communities of the Deccan plateau, where Digambara Jainism was long established under royal patronage, and the region preserves some of the oldest and most important Jain sites. The colossal monolithic image of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola, bathed once in some years in a great ceremony, stands at the centre of this world, and the surrounding basadis record centuries of Jain presence in the south. The temple thus marks a geography as well as a doctrine: the basadi of the Deccan against the derasar of the west, two regional forms of a single tradition divided over the depiction of its own saints.

Where the Svetambara derasar dresses its images, the basadi of the Digambara south leaves them deliberately bare, following the doctrine from which the tradition takes its very name, sky clad, holding that a tirthankara who has transcended worldly attachment is properly shown without clothing or ornament of any kind. The word basadi itself points to an older, more modest function than the grand temple the term now usually names, deriving from vasati, a dwelling, the lodging originally attached to a temple where wandering ascetics stayed during the monsoon retreat when travel became impractical. The southern tradition's best known monument is not, strictly, a basadi at all but explains why the form mattered so much in the region: the colossal free standing statue of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, commissioned in the tenth century by the general and minister Chavundaraya, stands beside a cluster of basadis that make the hill one of the principal pilgrimage centres of Digambara Jainism, and the unclothed, serene statue at its centre is the clearest possible statement of the doctrine that shapes every image the basadis around it contain.

The great statue itself is anointed in the Mahamastakabhisheka ceremony, held roughly every twelve years, when pilgrims climb scaffolding built for the occasion to pour milk, saffron and other substances over the figure, an event that still draws Digambara Jains from across India to the same hill the basadis around it were built to serve.