Krishnaswami Aiyangar
The essay was published in Jainacharya Shri Atmanand Janma Shatabdi Smarak Grantha (Jainacharya Shri Atmanand Centenary Commemoration Volume), edited by Mohanlal Dalichand Desai, Bombay 1936, pp. 101-106.
Jainism in South India
The entry of Jainism in South India still continues to be an obscure problem notwithstanding the great advance made in historical research within recent years. The earliest monuments of antiquity connected with these happen to be a number of cave dwellings with or without images of Jaina Tirtankaras scattered all over the land and giving indubitable evidence of age. The principal element in the determination of the age consists in a certain number of inscriptions, giving no more than the names of Jaina saints, sometimes found written adjacent to the seats or beds cut out in rock caves. The Brahmi script in which these inscriptions are written seem referable to the century before Christ and the first century or the second following Christ. In that period Jains must have come into the South and must have lived in various localities more or less as hermits living in uninhabited, or little inhabited, forest abodes. This perhaps lends colour to the tradition that is current that Bhadrabahu retired to the South, as the result of a famine, from Magadha in the last years of Chandragupta, and the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta himself is traditionally regarded as having followed the immigrant party. The two statements may be regarded separately without the one proving necessarily the actual occurrence of the other. The evidence so far available for the prevalence of Jainism in South India is not of a character to throw any direct light upon Chandragupta's association. The advent of Bhadrabahu however may be inferred there from with perhaps greater probability.
The earliest references to the Jains in Tamil literature happen to be merely some oblique references in the so-called Sangam classics. There are a couple of poems in the Ahanānūru which refer to the Jains as the "unwashed mendicants" from the character at least of one section of the Digambaras. One poem in the Puranānūru collection which celebrates an ideal Brahman of quality and achievements refers to him as one who, amidst other qualifications, was remarkable for his capacity to defeat in argument those who presented theories opposed to his with authorities seemingly Vaidik. This seems to convey Buddhists and Jains and it may be the Ājīvikas as well, whose theories and arguments may be capable of that kind of a description. Among the classics of Tamil literature there are two that stand out as poems ascribed to the Jains. One is the Kural itself, and the other a poem more or less of similar subject-matter going by the name Naladiyār. They are both of them ethical handbooks intended for guidance in life and covering practically the same ground. In regard to Naladiyār, its Jain character is not called into question; but its age is not quite beyond dispute as yet. In regard to the Kural, however, while the age of its writing may perhaps be more generally admitted, its Jaina character is not perhaps as readily acceptable. It is couched in such terms and expounds general truths which all the principal Indian religions have in common more or less. There are points here and there of a specific character, on which the claim to its Jain character is based, such, for instance as his moving on flowers and even the invocation to Adi Bhagavan. One might well question whether the Jains did recognise a divinity that could be described as Adi Bhagavan, which smacks a little more of the Pancharatra or the Bhaghavata. The walking on the flower is not perhaps so exclusively a characteristic of Jina alone. There are other references which can be regarded as specifically other than Jain and definitely Brahmanaik, which may even be regarded as quite unacceptable to the Jains as such. The claim therefore to its Jain character cannot be received with anything like the certainty, which the Jains themselves would claim for the work. If it is a question of Jain influence there may be a good deal in the work which might lend itself to that kind of a description. The evidence therefore being not decisive, we may for the moment not claim, the Kural as a Jain work of Tamil literature. But the claim to the authorship of the Kural as the Jains put it forward, is in intimate association with the Jain Acharya Kundakunda. The age of Kundakunda [1] may be some time in the third or fourth century of the Christian era, but could not be brought down low enough for any intimate association with the composition of the Kural. That again has to stand over as yet on an unsettled footing. So much however can be postulated of this period, that there were communities of Jain monks residing in various parts of South India in sequestered localities such as the caves on the hills etc., a little away from the crowd and din of ordinary life in cities; but perhaps not too far away for their getting food as mendicants.
With the rise of the Gangas of Mysore, we come upon clearer historical ground for Jainism in South India. Tradition connects the very foundation of the Ganga dynasty to the advice of Simhanandi. These Gangas rose to power in the Kolar District of Mysore, and their territory in the best of their days reached up to the Palar river near Vellore and farther south, and extended westwards to include in it the whole of the present-day district of Mysore and a considerable part of Hassan. In the general distribution of political power the Ganga country conies next after Kongu which took into it the Coimbatore and Saleni Districts roughly. In this kingdom of the Gangas and the neighbouring kingdom of Kongu as well, which at some periods had been under Ganga rule, we have vestiges of ancient monuments of a Jaina character, some of them of the first importance in Jaina history. Vijayapuram in the Coimbatore District was at one time a very important Jaina centre. The famous Jain shrine of Sravanabelgola in the Mysore State is a living monument of this dynasty of rulers, coming almost at the end of the period. There are numbers of monuments of minor importance ascribable to this period of Jain influence in the Mysore territory. In the Madras Presidency, Cuddalore (Pataliputra of the South) was an important Jaina centre in this early period, where there was a community of Jaina monks who exercised a considerable amount of influence. Kānchī, the headquarters of the Pallava kingdom and a Brahman Ghatika, contemporary with the Gangas, had a suburb which was an important Jaina centre from early times, and continued to be so even in the very best days of the empire of Vijayanagar. Koppal in the Nizam's Dominions perhaps goes back to that age. The important Vaishnava centre nowadays of Melkottai (Yadugiri-Tirunarayartapura in Vaishnava parlance) was known to have been a Jaina centre under the name Vardharnanapura and that seems to have continued down to the days of the empire of Vijayanagar. Without going into undue detail, we find that the age of the Gangas beginning in the fourth century and going on almost to the end of the eleventh was a period when Jainism had a considerable influence generally.
This period coincides with the period of the rise and development of the school of Bhakti which may be regarded, from one point of view, as the reorganisation of Brahmanism to meet the needs of a varied and a far wider community than the Brahmanaik community of old.
It was the age par excellence of the rise of Saivism and Vaishnavism through the two important schools of Bhakti, well-known in historical times, which in turn proved the centres from which the more popular and wider Bhakti cult spread northwards through the Mahratta country into Gujarat, and ultimately into the Gangetic Doab, spreading eastwards from there. In the literature of Hinduism relating to the school of Bhakti we come upon frequent references to Jainas and Jaina teaching sometimes described as vociferously hostile, and more often in very much more modified terms as another from, of persuasion receiving considerable allegiance from the people and calling for recognition as one of the accepted creeds of the inhabitants of South India. Apart from Pataliputra (Cuddalore in South Arcot District) and Kānchī, there seems to have been a very great centre of Jains in Madura in the 7th century, a locality round which numbers of far more ancient Jain monuments with the Prakrit inscriptions have also been found. Of course there is a gruesome tale of the defeat of the Jains in argument, and of their wholesale persecution by the victorious Saiva saints both in connection with Madura in the 7th century and in the centre of Cuddalore. These blood-curdling tales of persecution may have to be dismissed as pious frauds and exaggerations of the later hagiologists, as we have other evidence of a really more reliable character to indicate that the communities generally lived at peace with one another except for loud contentious and vociferous discussions. If the sectaries would have liked persecution even that is open to doubt - the rulers were not inclined to permit it, within their own territories. In the course of the eighth century, the centre of importance shifts from South India to the Mahratta country, and in the later period of that century this religion enjoyed the great patronage of the Rāshtrakūta rulers for the time being, the most important patron among them being Amogavarsha Nripatunga, who was himself a Jain and is said to have abdicated at the end of a long reign and took leave of life by the performance of the Jain ceremony of Sallekana, gradual starvation to death. Jinasena and Gunabhadra were two great luminaries who flourished in the reign. With the end of the first millennium the Jains lost political influence perhaps by ceasing to have royal patronage, but remained as still a community in the two sections of pious monks and a lay community coming in for special treatment under the rulers of the time.
One special feature of this we might notice here, the Jaina seem to have been early confounded with the Ājīvikas, who were perhaps more anathema to the Jains than even to the Brahmanical sects, and were often spoken of indifferently as one sect. The Jains were known to southern literature, Tamil literature in particular, as Nirgranthas. One of the recognised designations by which they were often known elsewhere. Another form in which they are known in the South is Asuvis, which is the Tamilisation of the term Ājīvikas. There was a special rate that was levied for the maintenance of the community of the Jaina monks, and the rate was designated Asuvikal Kasu, the cash duty or cess levied for the purpose of Jaina monks. Jaina and Buddhist centres alike flourished specifically designated by the name palli. This state of things continued under the empire of the Cholas, and there is perhaps only one instance of any importance, that, for some reason, there was a destruction of the caves of these Jainas by an outburst of popular fanaticism. Otherwise they do not appear to have suffered very much, as the Jaina centre at Conjeevaram received the patronage of the two generals of Vijayanagar in the early days of its existence, Chaichappa and his son Iruga, both of them generals of the empire. There are numbers of Jaina communities lying scattered in various centres all over the land still pursuing their peaceful occupations and continuing to be more or less prosperous.
The greatest setback that the Jains suffered in the Dakhan country was under the decaying power of the Chalukyas when there was a Kalachurya usurpation in the middle of the 10th century. A community of Vīraśaivas, which perhaps we can trace back to the days of the Pāśupatas and the Kāpālikas of the earlier centuries generally, growing into importance assumed a new form and acquired even a new degree of fanaticism about this time. They came into prominence in the Karnātaka country under the rule of Bijjala who was himself a Jain, but had two Brahman ministers, an uncle and a nephew, who held high positions in the state service. Led by these Brahmans, they broke out into even open rebellion, and in the course of the struggle, the Jains suffered much, before the rebel elements could be brought under control and made to pursue a normal course of life like communities. Thereafter the Jains have not achieved any prominence comparable to the position which they occupied under the Rāshtrakūtas in the days of Amogavarsha or in the seventh country of the Pandya previous to the days of Kun Pandya in the century. As one among the various communities constituting the population of the South, they were allowed to pursue their course of peaceful life and continue to be prosperous communities down to the present time.