Book Title: Mahavira and his Teaching
Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti
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338 K. A. NĪ LAKANȚA SASTRI & V. RAMASUBRAMANIAM, `AUNDY'
Harijans, as a mark of respectability, was, as we have said in para 8, of Jaina origin and connoted Jaina pupils only. The geographical sections of the Matsya-purana' locate them near about Kanyakumari and even call them ‘Kumāras'. (Skt. Kumāra = son = pillai). Tamil Jaina epigraphy applies the term to both the sexes. Such a peculiar usage of the term persists at present in the two pillar' communities only, viz. the Nāyars and the Nanjināļu veļļalas. Epigraphy and tradition inform us that these two communities were once in charge of many Jaina temples also.
100. The Na yars, again, are the only caste, besides the Nambūdhiris, who worship living serpents and reserve for them a bit of their residential premises as "Kāvus' (groves). The matrimonial alliances, referred to in epigraphy, between theogratic pontiffrulers and non-Brāhmin women, obtain even now in the Travancore and Cochin royal families, where the male members marry Na yar girls only. The kings bore the theocratic title of ‘tamburān' and in Travancore the tell-tale title of 'Venațțu-adikal was included among the royal burudas.
101. And, furthermore, the term 'Na ya', was the Jaina prakrit for 'nāta', the sub-clan of the Licchavis to which Bhagavān Mahāvīra belong. He was very often referred to as 'Nayaputa', a scion of the Na yas. It need not, therefore, suprise us if, within the next decade itself, archaeology unearths more positive evidence of the Jaina antecedents at least, if not the origin, of the Nayars and the Tamilian Pillais.
102. Even though there are a thousand vestiges of "the glorious Jainism that was" in the Tamil Land, we find today but a couple or two of living Jaina pockets, where a few hundreds of the followers of the Bhagavān carry on a losing battle against the forces of neo-Hindu mysticism. Chittāmūr, in the South Arcot district, is the present headquarters of the Jaina church, where a Jaina temple and a library survive under the management of a pontiff. The original seat of the guru was at Jina-Kāñci (Kānchípuram),
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