Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/98

 JAINA ARCHITECTURE. BOOK V. CHAPTER V. JAINA STYLE IN SOUTHERN INDIA. CONTENTS. Bettas Bastis. A GOOD deal has been done in the way of photographing the monuments of the Jains in southern India, but few plans of their buildings and fewer architectural details have yet been properly published, so that altogether our knowledge of the subject is somewhat superficial ; but it is interesting from its extent, and curious from the unexpected relationship it reveals with other styles. The Jains are said to have come to southern India, owing to a famine in the north in the first century, B.C. 1 We know from their cave temples that there were Jains at Aihole and Badami (supra, p. 18) as early as the end of the 6th, or certainly in the /th century ; 2 but after that there is a pause or break of four or five centuries, when the style reappears in strength at Belgaum and in that neighbourhood in the nth and 1 2th centuries. 3 In the same manner southern Jains seem to have pressed northward as far as Elura in the Qth century, taking their Dravidian style with them (supra, p. 20) ; but there again we stop, in so far as any direct evidence has been found, till the great outburst of Jaina magnificence at the end of the loth century, which then seems to have continued in the north till disturbed by the Muhammadan invasion. It is by no means clear whether the destruction of their temples, as at Ajmir and Delhi, may not have led many of the Jains to move south to the Dekhan. Of course it existed in Mysore long before, and some of the early kings of the Chalukya and Hoysala Ballala dynasties were nominally patrons at least of the Jains. All their later buildings, however, so far as we know them, either at Somnathpur, Belur, or Halebid, belong to the Brahmanical sects. 1 ' Epigraphia Indica,' vol. iv. pp. 24, 26, 28 ; ' Indian Antiquary,' vol. xxi. p. 60. 2 ' Archaeological Survey of Western India,' vol. i. pp. 25, 26, 37, 38, and plates 36, 37, 48, and 49. 3 But early in the 8th century Kunku- mah^devi, sister of Vijayaditya, the Chalukya king, built a Jaina temple a Lakshme.rvar.