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Jainism in Tamilnadu: The Early Phase
Iravatham Mahadevan
The cave inscriptions in Tamilnadu contain a wealth of information about the early Tamil society and language. Even though the inscriptions have been known for a long time, their unique paleographical and linguistic features were not fully understood until recently. Even now the contents of these inscriptions are known only to a small number of specialists. The purpose of this article is to bring to the notice of a wider audience an important aspect of the Tamil cave inscriptions, viz., the new light they shed on the earliest phase of Jainism in Tamilnadu.
When the cave inscriptions in Tamilnadu were first discovered early in the 20th century, and the writing was recognized to be very similar to the Mauryan Brahmi script, it was naturally assumed that the inscriptions were in the Pali language and the caves were occupied by the Buddhist monks in the wake of the southern expansion of Buddhism from the time of Asoka. However, when the inscriptions were eventually deciphered, it became clear that they are written in Tamil and that most of them record gifts of monasteries to the Jaina monks.
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Fig. 1: Cave Inscription near Madurai recording the endowment of a Jaina monastery by a Pandya king (2 cent. B.C.).
The cave inscriptions are written in a variant of the Mauryan Brahmi script, after adapting it to the phonetic requirements of Tamil. The near-identical shapes of the letters of the two scripts at the earliest stage indicate that the introduction of the Brahmi script in Tamilnadu took place in the Early Mauryan Period. Among the great Mauryan emperors,
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