Jain Merchants and the Making of Neighbourhood Heritage in Shahjahanabad: Dariba, Dharampura, and Satghara

This paper examines the relationship between Jain mercantile networks, neighbourhood formation, and religious institutions in Shahjahanabad through the micro-history of Satghara in Dharampura. Existing histories of Old Delhi have given substantial attention to Mughal sovereignty, monumental architecture, major markets, and urban transformation, while smaller community institutions through which merchant groups organised religious and neighbourhood life remain less fully examined. The study places Satghara within the commercial and residential landscape of Chandni Chowk, Dariba, and Dharampura and asks how merchant patronage was translated into a durable local religious institution. Attention is given to the Shri 1008 Parshvanath Digambar Jain Mandir, its reported development from a chaityalaya in 1903 to a shikhar-bandh temple in 1940, its association in the temple inscription with Chandamal Jankidas and the Stree Samaj, and its present management and ritual practices. Using published scholarship, temple documentation, visual evidence, inscriptional material, and contemporary community testimony, the paper distinguishes established historical evidence from later memory and present-day accounts. Satghara is so interpreted not simply as a surviving temple, but as a case through which changes in merchant patronage, neighbourhood organisation, and Jain community life can be studied at the local scale.