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Noi IV
JAINA ART IN SOUTH INDIA
other walk of life. For instance, in the Chandragupta Basti at Sravana Bego!a, the fagade is made of a perforated stone screen containing as many as ninety sculptured scenes of events in the lives of Bhadrabāhu and Chandragupta. It also finds illustration in the pictorial art of painting. On the walls of the Jaina Matha at Beļgola are several examples of how the chief tenets of their religion were sought to be inculcated by means of this art. In one of the panels (North) Parsvanātha is represented in his samavasarana or heavenly pavilion where the Revalin or Jina preaches eternal wisdom to the śrāvaka. A tree with six persons on it illustrates the six lesyas of Jaina philosophy by which the soul gets merit and demerit. Neminātha is also similarly represented in the act of expounding religious doctrine. The only secular scene that finds a place there is that of Krishnarāja Odeya III during his Dasarā-darbār (on the right panel of the middle cell)?. But even such paintings are very rare in South India. There is nothing in what has survived of Jaina art in South India comparable with the immaculate Buddhist frescoes of Ajanta. A few traces of old paintings are still to be seen on the ceilings of the Ellora caves. There are also some at Cānchipuram and Tirumalai in the South 3. Dubreuil has drawn attention to others at Sittanavasa] in Pudukottai State, near Tanjore, assigned to about the 7th cent. A D.4. These paintings are in a Jaina rock.cut temple, akin in their style to Ajanta. but less forceful and impres sive.5 More interesting, perhaps, are those of Tirumalai (N. Arcot). Smith says, the Jaina holy place at Tirumalai'is "remarkable as possessing the remains of a set of wall and ceiling paintings ascribed, on the evidence of inscriptions, to the 11th cent. A. D. (E.I. ix,229;”.6 Traces exist of still older paintings covered up by the existing works. But with the exception of one they are 1. Rice, Mysore and Coorg from the Inscriptions, p. 5; cf. Smith,
op. cit. ; pp. 270. . Cf. Ep. Car. II Introd., pp. 80-81. 3. Coomaraswamy, op. cit., pp. 118-18 ; Ibid. III. PI. LXXX. 256. 4. Dubreuil. Pallava Painting, d. 3: Coomaraswamy, op. cit., p. 89. 5. Cf. Ajit Ghose, A Comparative Survey of Indian Painting, I.H.Q,
II 2, p. 303. 6. Smith, op. cit., p. 344.
