To reduce these Jain temples to “ruins” is not merely a misreading of their material condition: it is a profound misrecognition of the ethical, cosmological, and aesthetic frameworks they articulate. Shaped by the principle of Ahimsa, these structures are sacred not only because of belief, but because they express an ethics - of restraint, of silence, of the sanctity of life in all its forms.

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Yet in contemporary South Asia, heritage regimes continue to treat such sites as inert. They are often valued only insofar as they fit the taxonomies of archaeology, art history, or tourism. As Nayanjot Lahiri notes in Marshalling the Past, archaeological practices have historically “shut out” the very affective, ritual, and political lives of heritage, reducing complex living spaces to mere scientific detritus and archival objects.[1] She reminds us that this “unpeopling of the past” is not a neutral act; it is deeply entangled with the secular epistemologies of modern heritage governance.

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Upinder Singh, in The Discovery of Ancient India, critiques early archaeological methods for prioritizing stylistic and chronological classification over the embedded spiritual and cultural meaning of sacred spaces. These frameworks, she argues, favored empires over ecologies, and form over cosmology. [2] In a place like Nagarparkar, such preservation models risk treating Jain architecture as empty form - severed from the spirit that shaped it.
 

Beyond the overt neglect lies a quieter, more insidious form of erasure: the ideological performance of inclusion. Himani Bannerji, in The Dark Side of the Nation, explores how multicultural policy in Canada operates performatively - staging inclusion while structurally excluding minority narratives. [3] Though her context is different, her critique applies here: in Pakistan, selective preservation and institutional silence around Jain heritage function similarly. What appears as bureaucratic indifference is often a political decision to let memory decay. In such cases, neglect is not passive; it is ideological.

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The use of steel clamps, cement patches, and nailed wood in so-called “restoration” projects signals more than poor material judgment. It reflects a fundamental disconnection from the spiritual and philosophical grammar of these sites. These gestures are not restorative; they are extractive.

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And yet, alternatives exist. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has demonstrated that ethical restoration is possible: their work at the Wazir Khan Mosque and Humayun’s Tomb integrates historical integrity with ecological and social contexts. In Nepal, Götz Hagmüller’s decades-long work at the Patan Museum exemplifies care that listens to atmosphere, memory, and artisan knowledge rather than simply stabilizing structure.

Karoonjhar, too, requires this kind of attention. It is not just a home to sacred architecture; it is an animate geography, a terrain that holds memory in stone. To care for it is not to reconstruct the past, but to enter into a relation with it - intellectually, ethically, and bodily.