ABSTRACT
Less well publicised, although in its own way equally intense, has been a dispute in another part of Maharashtra over the ownership of the shrine at flirpur whose image is known as Antarik‚a Pår¬va, ‘Floating Pår¬va’, because it is supposed to have appeared in the air to its legendary discoverer when he was wandering in a forest unable to find a Jain temple in which to worship.15 The fame of this image was great in the medieval period and the flvetåmbara Jinaprabha S¨ri (1261-1333) refers to it in his guide to pilgrimage places (VTK 58), while another source of about the same time claims that the image was consecrated by a flvetåmbara teacher called Abhayadeva the Filthy, which suggests some sort of medieval flvetåmbara connection with the site, even if the influence of the sect in that region was to wane until this century.16
