Bhaktamar Diwas 2026

Tradition holds that Acharya Manatungacharya composed the Bhaktamar Stotra while imprisoned by a king in forty-eight iron chains across forty-eight cells, after rival courtiers challenged him to prove his spiritual power. As he composed and recited each verse in devotion to Bhagwan Rishabhanatha, one chain is said to have broken and one cell door to have opened, until by the forty-eighth verse he walked free. The stotra is revered as much for this testimony to the power of bhakti (devotion) as for its literary and philosophical depth.

The name Bhaktamar comes from the opening word of the first verse, "Bhaktamara-pranata-maulimani-prabhanam" — "at whose feet the crowns of devoted gods bow and shine" — addressed to Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara. Its Digambar counterpart, composed in the same metre and tradition of imprisonment-and-liberation, is the Kalyan Mandir Stotra dedicated to Bhagwan Parshvanath.

Because the stotra is held to combine deep philosophical content (reflections on omniscience, the nature of the Tirthankara and right perception) with intense devotional feeling, its annual observance is described as Bhakti aur Gyan ka Parva — a festival of both devotion and knowledge, not devotion alone.

In recent decades, Jain organisations and sanghs across India and the Jain diaspora have coordinated a single annual date for collective recitation and celebration — observed and promoted as International Bhaktamar Diwas, Bhaktamar Vishwa Utsav (the 'world festival of Bhaktamar') and World Bhaktamar Day — so that communities on every continent recite the same forty-eight verses on the same day, at the same symbolic minute, in a single coordinated act of devotion.