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than Mallu Khan son of Mallu Khan, the well-known governor of Chanderi during this period. One peculiar feature of the Bhattarakas of the Chanderi patta was that they came from the Parwar caste of the Digambar community, a caste which predominates among the jains in Bundelkhand even today.
The patta of Sonagiri (Datia district) was a branch pitha of Gwalior, the greatest and most flourishing Digamber Jain centre in the capital town of the Tomara rulers. The name is supposed to have been derived from Shramanagiri, ascribed to Shramanasena Muni (V. S. 1335). The Bhattarakas of this centre belonged to the Kashtha sangha, Mathur gachcha-Pushkar gana. The first guru, who has found mention in inscriptions dated 1449, 53 and 73 A. D., was Kamalakirti who left a disciple Shubhachandra to succeed him.
Jina Taran Taran Swami
The fifteenth century of the Christian era is a century of Hindu-Muslims coming together--an intermingling of the two communities and mutual reapproachment. In spite of wars and conquests and lack of a strong central government, there was prosperity all round; grains and other necessities of life were cheap. Sufis of the Chishtiya Order wielded great influence over the masses-Muslims and non-Muslims. Not only did they approach the people through the medium of the mother tongue and compose love poems in the village dialects but before the close of the century, Kayasthas, Khattris and Kashmiri pundits took to learning Persian, the court language and filling the revenue offices of the Sultans.
Among the most outstanding provincial kingdoms were those of Jaunpur, Mando and Ahmadabad. Sant Kabir the most radical social reformer hailed from Varanasi in the Sharqi dominions and his verses embodying new ideas were steeped in the Jain-Nathpanthi traditions. He called upon the Brahman-dominated neo -Vaishnavism to fall in line with his principles of cultural synthesis and liberalism in faith and practice leading to mutual tolerance and fraternization of castes and creeds. He not only condemned casteism but made idol worship the target of his attack.
Simultaneously with Kabir among Hindu Vaishnavas of Madhyadesa, flourished Lonkasah among the Shvetambar Jains of western India who organized a similar movement of radical reform with his centre at Ahmadabad during the first half of the fifteenth century. Like Kabir in Northern India, Lonka-Sah raised the banner of revolt against the Jain priesthood and called upon them to prove the justification of idol worship on the basis of Jain agama literature. Of his two main disciples, one hailed from Mandogarh, the capital of the Sultans of Malwa through whom the preachings of Lonkasah must have filtered down to the Jain masses in Malwa.
Lonkasah's thoughts were, however, echoed from an unexpected quarter by a none too learned Digambar Jain of Chanderi-Damovadesa' in Bundelkhand namely Jina
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