Jaina Art and Architecture Vol 02

Author(s): A Ghosh
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 69

CHAPTER 201
NORTH INDIA the Buddhist Dharma-cakra-Jina-vihāra at Sarnath. Govindacandra also donated a village to the Buddhist sangha at Srāvasti.
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Jaina images found at Kausâmbi, Mathurā, Srāvasti and other places indicate that Jainism flourished well under the Gähadavālas. Some of the rulers of this house appear to have had diplomatic relations with the Caulukyas of Gujarat. The Kumärapäla-carita records that Kumārapāla Caulukya sent his ministers to Kāśi, to suppress injury to animals. A poet named Visvešvara of Kāśi, who, according to the Prabandha-cintamani, attended a literary meeting at Pațțana organized by the great Jainācārya Hemacandra during the reign of Kumārapāla, was perhaps an official representative of the Gāhadavāla court. The overlord of Kāśi, who conferred the title of Vadisimha on Abhayadeva, a famous Jaina poet, seems to be a later Gähadaväla ruler. An inscription (v.s. 1207=A.D. 1151) on a pillar-capital fixed in the L'āl-Darwāza Masjid at Jaunpur mentions onc bhattāraka Bhăvibhūşaņa, who may be taken to be a Jaina ascetic of importance in view of his title. He was possibly connected with some Jaina religious establishment in the Jaunpur area.
The vast territory from the Siwaliks in the north to Chitor in the south and from the eastern fringe of the great Rajasthan desert to Vārānasi or a little beyond formed the kingdoms of the imperial Cāhamanas and the Gāhadavālas. Literary and epigraphical references as well as material remains indicate that numerous Jaina shrines were built in this hcartland of India during the eleventh and twelfth centuries both by the public and the kings and nobles. These edifices, probably represented many significant aspects of Jaina art and architecture, but the evidence available to us, unfortunately, is limited both in time and space. Of the excellent Cähamāna temples at Säkambhari, Ajayameru, Amer, Nagaur, Pallu, Sanganer and Ranthambhor, all in Rajasthan, at Dhillikā (Delhi-Mehrauli area) and at Asikā (Hansi), Pinjaur and other places in Haryana, we have either no traces of the structures or the remains are so fragmentary that they hardly help us in the reconstruction of exact temple-forms and the analyses of architectural movements properly. Some remarkable shrines built during the reign of Cāhamānas of Nadol, who were feudatories of the Caulukyas, however, do survive in their original form.
The position in respect of the monuments raised during the Gähadavāla rule is still worse. There is not a single Jaina or even Brāhmaṇical shrine in proper
1 Roma Niyogi, The History of the Gahadavala Dynasty, Calcutta, 1959, p. 82.
* A. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India Report, 1871, XI, reprinted Varanasi, 1966, p. 126.
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