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POPULAR SUPPORT
201 Cattaladevi and Pampādevī.
In the course of the description of the benevolent work of General Hulla, it was remarked that one of the centres where he built five great basadis was Kellangere. This, we may be permitted to repeat, was an original holy place (ädi-tīrtha) formerly founded by the Gangas.2 Evidence of the centre having been founded by the Gangas, however, is not forthcoming in history. But all the same there cannot be any doubt that the antiquity of Kellangere can be carried to at least two centuries earlier than the age of General Hulla. We prove this by the Lakkanna Biraņņa stone inscription found at Bastihaļļi, Haļebid, and dated A.D. 952, in which the following is narrated-That in the reign of the Ganga king Bhūtuga (A.D. 938-A.D. 953), Ballappa captured Kellangere with the aid of archers. Moni (Mauni ?) Bhațţāraka, the disciple of Guņasāgara of the lineage of Kondakunda, was then in Kellangere. When Ballappa besieged that centre, Moni Bhattáraka, so it is said in the record, “gained the approval and affection of the world," on which Kiriya Moni Bhatar, the disciple of Abhayacandra Pandita, erected a monument for him. It cannot be made out whether we are to infer that the (senior) Moni Bhattāraka valiantly withstood the attack on Kellangere by Ballappa, and that he died in its defence. This doubt arises from two considerations—the fact of the death of Moni Bhattāraka having been made immediately after the attack on that town by Ballappa ; and secondly, from the opening lines of the praise bestowed on the Jaina guru, viz., that praise was not to be given to the effeminate but (only) to the beloved, the treasury of virtues-Moni in Kel
1. M. A. R. for 1929, p. 7. See above Ch. V. 2. E. C. II. 345, op. cit.
