Atmanandji Jainacharya Janmashatabdi Smarakgranth

Author(s): Mohanlal Dalichand Desai
Publisher: Atmanand Janma Shatabdi Smarak Trust

Page 183

Jainism in South India
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 comes next after Kongu which took into it the Coimbatore and Salem 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. Kanchī, the head quarters of the Pallava Kingdom and a Brahman Ghatika, contemporary with the Gangas, had a suburb which was an important Jaina centra 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 now-a-days of Melkottai, (Yadugiri-Tiruņaşayaņapura in Vaishnava parlance), was known to have been a Jaina centre under the name Vardhamanapura 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 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
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[ Shree Atmaramji