Sammed Shikharji

Sammed Shikharji is the most sacred place in Jainism, and in 2022 it produced the largest Jain political mobilisation in modern Indian history. It is also claimed, on different grounds, by a people the Jain campaign did not address.

Why it matters to Jains

Twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras are held to have attained moksha on this hill, liberation, the end of rebirth. No other site comes close.

Thirty-one shrines stand along the ridge, most holding carved footprints rather than images. The circuit is about twenty-seven kilometres, made barefoot, usually beginning well before dawn and completed in a single day.

Both Digambaras and Svetambaras revere it. How control is actually divided is not cleanly established: Akbar granted management to a Svetambara acharya in 1583, the Svetambara Anandji Kalyanji Trust bought the hill in 1918, and Digambaras assert co-equal rights of worship. The legal position has been litigated more than once and remains unsettled.

December 2022

The Jharkhand government moved to develop the hill as a tourism and eco-tourism destination.

The Jain response was immediate and national: mass protests in cities across India, a one-day national strike, and sustained pressure on the central government. A Digambara monk died while fasting in the course of the campaign.

The central government halted tourism development on the hill in January 2023.

The objection was specific and worth stating in the community's own terms. Tourism at Sammed Shikharji would mean meat, alcohol, hotels and recreation on ground where twenty Tirthankaras attained liberation, and where pilgrims walk barefoot and fasting. It was not an objection to visitors; it was an objection to the ground being reclassified as a leisure asset.

Marang Buru

Set against that is a claim the Jain campaign did not engage with.

The Santhal, an Adivasi people forming a large part of Jharkhand's population, know the mountain as Marang Buru, the great mountain, the seat of their principal deity. They describe their worship there as older than the Jain presence, and they hold customary rights of access, hunting and gathering on the hill.

Prohibitions on meat and alcohol on the mountain, upheld by the Jharkhand High Court in 2025, bear directly on Santhal practice, which is not vegetarian and involves ritual hunting.

Jain bodies hold that the two communities have shared the mountain since antiquity and that there is no conflict. Santhal organisations dispute that, and have held their own protests asserting prior right.

Why the case is unusual

The party defending a sacred site against commercial development by the state is also the party a second community is contesting.

Neither position is straightforwardly the one to support, and there is no custodian who could consent on behalf of the mountain, because there is more than one custodian and they do not agree.

Most sacred-site disputes in this atlas are a community against a state or a corporation. This one is a community against a state, and a community against a community, at the same time.

Sammed Shikharji is not simply one sacred mountain among several for Jains; tradition holds that twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras achieved final liberation on this specific peak.

The most liberations tied to one place

Jain tradition holds that twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras attained moksha, final liberation from the cycle of rebirth, at Sammed Shikharji, a concentration of significance unmatched by any other single Jain pilgrimage site, including Shatrunjaya and Girnar, each of which is tied more narrowly to one or two specific Tirthankaras rather than to the majority of the entire line.

A different name, a different meaning

The same hill is known to the local Santhal people as Marang Buru, meaning great mountain, a name reflecting an entirely separate indigenous sacred tradition that predates, and exists independently of, its Jain significance, with the Santhal understanding the mountain through their own cosmology rather than through the Tirthankara liberation narrative.

Two traditions, one physical mountain

The mountain's standing as sacred ground to both communities, on entirely different religious terms, is the underlying fact behind the land-use dispute covered in this entry's companion article, and this entry describes both traditions' claims to the mountain's significance rather than treating either one as merely incidental to the other.