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Contribution of Jainism to Indian Culture :: 125
any branch of science that has not been ably treated by the Jainas.
The literature of the Jainas is also very important from the point of view of the history of Indian languages for the Jainas always took care that their writings were accessible even to the masses of the people. Hence the canonical writings and the earliest commentaries are written in Prakrit dialects and at a later period Sanskrit and various modern Indian languages were used by the Jainas. That is why it is not an exaggeration when the famous Indologist H.H. Wilson says that every province of Hindustan can produce Jaina compositions, either in Sanskrit or in its vernacular idioms. It is an established fact that the Jainas have enriched various regional languages and especially Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.
Regarding the Jaina contribution to Kannada literature, the great Kannada scholar R. Narasimhacharya has given his considered opinion in the following terms: “The earliest cultivators of the Kannada language were Jainas. The oldest works of any extent and value that have come down to us are all from the pen of the Jainas. The period of the Jainas' predominance in the literary field may justly be called the ‘Augustan Age of Kannada Literature'. Jaina authors in Kannada are far more numerous than in Tamil. To name only a few, we have Pampa, Ponna, Ranna, Gunavarman, Nāgachandra, Nayasena, Nāgavarman, Aggala, Nemichandra, Janna, Andayya, Bandhuvarmā and Medhura, whose works are admired as excellent specimens of poetical composition. It is only in Kannada that we have a Rāmāyāna and a Bhārata based on the Jaina tradition in addition to those based on Brahmanical tradition. Besides kävyas written by Jaina authors, we have numerous works by them dealing with subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, prosody, mathematics, astrology, medicine, veterinary science, cookery and so forth. In all the number of Jaina authors in Kannada is nearly two hundred.”
As the Jainas have produced their vast literature in these
