A small Jain community has existed in Punjab for a very long time, concentrated in the trading towns.
Punjab has Jain temples at Ludhiana, Malerkotla, Patti, Sunam and elsewhere, and a distinctive local tradition of Jain manuscript painting and temple building.
The Jain bhandars, manuscript libraries, of northern India are among the oldest continuously maintained collections in the subcontinent, and the Punjab ones are small and old.
Vijayanandsuri, also called Atmaramji, born at Lehra in Ferozepur district in 1837, was among the most significant Jain reformers of the nineteenth century and represented Jainism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 through a deputy.
The community is small enough to be invisible in most accounts of Punjab and old enough to predate almost everything else in them.
That combination, ancient and unnoticed, describes several of Punjab's communities.
Vijayanandsuri began as a Sthanakvasi monk, changed to the image-worshipping tradition after study, and led a reform movement across northern India. He was invited to the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893 and sent a representative in his place.
The Jain traders of the Punjab towns were part of the same commercial network as the Khatri and Arora firms and worked in cloth, grain and moneylending.
The community lost its western Punjab centres in 1947. The temples at Ludhiana, Malerkotla and elsewhere are maintained and are invisible to anyone not looking for them.