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The Ajita-purāņa of Ranna
Stefan Anacker
The Ajita-purāna of Ranna is the shortest Jina-purāna in Old Kannada. In spite of this, it has always been considered a major classic of that literature. Ranna is in fact, along with Pampa and Ponna, both of the first half of the tenth century, the most praised Old Kannada poet - Pampa, Ponna and Ranna are sometimes called << The Trinity >> of Old Kannada literature. The Old Kannada Jina-purāņas, and longer poems in general, are campus, that is, they combine prose with verse in different meters.
Many details regarding Ranna's life are given by the poet himself. He was born in 949 in Muduvasalu of the Jambhukhandi 70, which is today Mudhol in Bijapur district. His mother was named Abbalabbe, his father Janavallabhendra, and he had three elder brothers named Drąhabāhu, Rēchanna and Guņimāramayya. This family was of the bangle-seller's caste, and was very devoted to Jainism. On reaching adolescence, Ranna did not want to continue his ancestral trade; leaving this to his brothers, he left his native village to go to the Ganga kingdom i. e. the territory corresponding roughly to the later Kingdom of Mysore. There he met Cāmundarāya, minister to the Ganga king Rāchamalla (reigned 974-984 AD), and commander-in-chief of his army. Cāmundarāya was also a devout Jaina. He was responsible for the erection of the giant statue of Gommateśvara (Bāhubali, son of the first Tīrthankara) at Śravanabelgola, the largest monolithic statue in the world, and is also the author of the Kannada prose work “Trişaşțilaksana-mahāpurāņa", which relates the stories of the sixty-three great men of ancient Jainism. Both Ranna and Cāmundarāya became pupils of the Jaina teacher Ajitasenācārya, from whom Ranna received a fine education in Kannada, Prakrit and Sanskrit.
Ranna's first work may have been the ‘Paraśurāma-carita', which was probably dedicated to Cāmundarāya, who had the biruda Samara-Paraśurāma. This work is no longer
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