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CONTRIBUTION OF THE JAINAS TO HINDI LITERATURE.
By Sri C. S. K. Jain, M. A.
The great political storm which swayed over India just before and after the advent of the Musalmans, threw away the Indian people, all of a sudden, so far away from their old traditions, that they could not be able to get together even those valuat-les which were the results of thousands of years of their experiments and thoughts. Tlie period of Indian History after the death of Harsha upto the settlement of Muslim Empires, has been rightly branded as The Dark Age, because the current literature of the general folk of the time, the burning torch of the age, has been sacrificed among the high flames of communalism and racealism.
The Jain-literature has proved itself to be the only helpful means for having a peep through the veil of ignorance spread over the age. According to Jain philosophy, the Shastras (sayings of respectable Jain monks) have been held in regard just on equal footing with the Devas (Jain dieties) and the Gurus (Jain sages). As a result, the Jainas tried their best to protect Jain literature also along with their sacred images. This vast literature, still sale in big Jain religious libraries all over ludia, has its significance not only for getting a cluc to our long delateri religious, historical or philological problems, but also in bridging the way to our ancient literary glory. It is a matter of reylet that only a few literary magnets have cared to survey or even to pass through this highway of our literary tradition.
Right from the lifetime of Bhagwan Mahabir, language of the general folk received its duc respect in Jain literature. Jain monks and pools always tried to incorporate the feeling, the thought and the voice of the general mass in its own language. Near about the 10th century A.D., Jainisin was the most pupular faith in some parts of India such as the Deccan, thc Rajasthan, Gujrat and other western provinces. Under suitable state-protection Jain monks remained always busy in injecting Jain religious principles among the householdersthrough their works on almost all branchs of literature like history,
