Modelo ADDIE

The unique body of Jain Sanskrit texts affiliated with Amōghavarṣa’s court explored above exerted a strong influence over how the history of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa Empire was conceived and, in particular, how its inscriptions were interpreted. As highlighted in the introduction to the chapter, out of the succession of Rāṣṭrakūṭas rulers, Amōghavarṣa (800-878 C.E.) is particularly associated with an intensification of Rāṣṭrakūṭa Jain

patronage. The pervasive Jain presence in Amōghavarṣa’s literary archive makes such associations seem quite justified. Yet, if we turn to the inscriptional archive, we find quite a different picture. P.B Desai’s volume Jainism in South India and Some Jain Epigraphs

includes the following heavily damaged inscription of King Amōghavarṣa from Koppaḷ: (Lines 1-4) “Hail! When the illustrious Nṛpatuṅga Vallabha, destroyer of his enemies, was ruling the earth,……….……..having decided ‘this, verily, is the opportune moment!’ and having valorously put up an intensive fight on the field of battle on that day………the highly praised warrior attained the happiness of the lord of the gods……..

(Lines 5-6)………who was a reservoir of great qualities………….in the encounter.61

Despite its inclusion in a volume on Jain epigraphy, there is no indication of any Jain orientation to this particular inscription. Rather, it reads as a fragmentary eulogy to a hero

61 _{P.B Desai, Jainism in South India and Some Jain Epigraphs (Solapur: Jaina Samskriti}

slain in battle along the lines of a hero-stone (vīrakal) that were common in the medieval Deccan. The basis of Desai’s identification of this inscription as Jain is unclear. Perhaps he extrapolated the inscription's Jain orientation from its location at Koppaḷ, or Kopaṇa, which rivaled Śravaṇa Beḷgoḷa in its importance as a medieval Jain tīrtha. Or perhaps even more troubling, by the mere presence of Amōghavarṣa, a supposedly “Jain king,” Desai back read a Jain affiliation onto an inscription.

The Konnur Inscription found in Dharwar district is another example often cited by Jain scholars, such as Hampana Nagarajaiah, to demonstrate Amōghavarṣa’s Jain affiliation. The first fifty-seven verses of this inscription, which date paleographically to the mid-twelfth century, profess to be a stone copy of a ninth-century copper charter.62

The first two verses read:

(Verse 1.) May the beloved of Fortune, with whom all forms are conjoined, who with his discus destroys the conceits of adversaries, the infinite being before whom bow down the lords of the immortals, the primeval lord Jina, grant to me supreme bliss. (Verse 2.) May the lord Vīra-Nārāyaṇa protect you here, he who rests on the body of (the serpent) Ananta, (and) is the mountain from which rise men of valorous conduct, the progenitor of the mighty race of the excellent Rāṣṭrakūṭas.63

Nagarajaiah reads the parallel invocation of Viṣṇu's discus and the Jina within the first verse as an example of medieval ecumenicalism; Viṣṇu and the Jina happily exist side by side within a single conceptual and inscriptional space.64 However, a closer inspection of the inscription instead suggests a somewhat sloppy replacement of the Jina for Viṣṇu made by the scribe during the transcription process from the copper-charter to stone. There are no Jain traces of to be found in the remainder of the praśasti, which instead

62 _{F. Kielhorn, “No. 4.—Konnur Spurious Inscription of Amoghavarsha I.; Saka-Samvat}

782,” EI Vol. 6, 25.

63 _{Ibid., 34.}

64 _{Hampa Nagarajaih, A History of the Rāṣṭakūṭas of Maḷkhēḍ and Jainism (Bangalore:}

employs the standard Vaiṣṇava imagery of Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscriptions. For example, the second verse describes Viṣṇu as Vīranārāyaṇa—another common epithet of

Amōghavarṣa—and invokes the image of Viṣṇu reclining on the serpent Ananta.65 _Placed

within the larger context of Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscriptions, most notably in the Sañjan Plates of Amōghavarṣa, we find these same two verses reduplicated verbatim without the reference to the Jina making it quite clear the "Jina" of this inscription is an interpolation of what was otherwise a standard Rāṣṭrakūṭa Vaiṣṇava praśasti. 66

The body of the Konnur inscription goes on to makes a grant to a Jain temple at the request of the Amōghavarṣa's general Baṅkēya who founded the temple in honor of the Jain ascetic Dēvēndra of the Pustaka Gaccha, of the Dēśiya Gaṇa of the Mūla Saṅgha. This mediated quality of the Konnur inscription is characteristic of Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscriptions of this period, in which we see donations or memorials to specific Jain ascetics and communities made by individuals, organizations, or regional polities framed by Rāṣṭrakūṭa Vaiṣṇava praśastis. The Saundatti inscription of Rāṣṭrakūṭa Kṛṣṇa II, Amōghavarṣa’s son, is another example that follows this model with the body of the inscription describing a grant to the Jinēndra Bhavana by Mahāsāmanta Pṛthvīrāma, a Raṭṭa feudatory of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, who was a disciple of the Jain ascetic, Guṇakīrti.67 _In

both the Konnur and Saundatti inscriptions, Rāṣṭrakūṭa patronage of the Jain community did not emanate directly from the center, but from intermediaries or feudatories—such as Baṅkēya and Pṛthvīrāma—who cultivated relationships to specific Jain munis and lineages. The material relationship between the Rāṣṭrakūṭas and the Digambara Jain

65 _{The epithet of Vīranārāyaṇa is also found in verse thirty-four of the same inscription.} 66 _{Bhandarkar, “Sanjan Plates of Amoghavarsha I,” 235-257.}

67 _{J.F. Fleet, “A Series of Sanskrit and Old Canarese Inscriptions Relating to the Raṭṭa}

community of this period is always indirect and expressed through nested sets of relationships within the inscriptional record.

Indeed, despite a sizeable amount of scholarship that has connected the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, and Amōghavarṣa to the Jain community of the Deccan there is simply very little epigraphic evidence to substantiate such claims.68 While there are over fifty inscriptions dated to the reign of Amōghavarṣa, only a few inscriptions directly emanate from Amōghavarṣa himself.69 _{An inscription from the Rāṣṭrakūṭa capital Mānyakhēṭa}

dated 871 C.E., is a rare example when Amōghavarṣa fleetingly appears beyond the mode

of formal address in the guise of a devotee to the goddess. The donative portion of the grant details the gift of a village to four Brahmans for the maintenance of the bali, caru,

viśvadēva, agnihōtra and atithitarpaṇa sacrifices. However, in the praśasti portion we find a more illuminating passage. In verse forty-seven, the grant describes how the king presented his left finger to the Goddess Mahālakṣmi—likely the Mahālakṣmi at Kolhapur—in order to prevent some sort of calamity. It is within this sole epigraph that Amōghavarṣa moves most palpably within the realm of religious practice.

Material patronage of Jainism in the medieval period occurred across all spectrums and scales of authority, however, there is a qualitatively different character between the epigraphical records of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas and the plurality of regionally based polities of the western Deccan that stretched from Kolhapur to South Kanara. These

68 _{See for example, R.S. Altekar, “Jainism in the Deccan under the Rashtrakutas” Jaina}

Siddhānta Bhāskara Vol. 15 (1949); A.N. Altekar, The Rashṭrakūṭas and Their Times; Hampa Nagarajaih, A History of the Rāṣṭakūṭas of Maḷkhēḍ and Jainism (Bangalore: Anikita Pustaka, 2000); S.R. Sharma, Jainism and Karnāṭaka Culture (Dharwar: N.S. Kamalapur, 1940); R.B. Prasad Singh, Jainism in Early Medieval Karnataka, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975).

69 _{Daya Ram Sahni, “No. 24.—Chhatarpur Copper-Plate Inscription of}

smaller regional polities—including the Gaṅgas of Taḷakāḍ, Kadambas of Banavāsi, the Raṭṭas of Saundatti, the Śīlāhāras of Kolhapura, and the Śāntaras of Huṃca—many of whom were feudatories of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, created alternative networks of religio- political relationships through direct material patronage of local Jain ascetics, monastic lineages, and temples. The expression of the relationships that these dynasties maintained with the Jain community were rhetorically standardized with the eight-century records of the Gaṅgas. These records trace the origins of the Gaṅga dynasty to an encounter

between the brothers Dadiga and Madhava and the Jain Ācārya Siṃhanandi who obtains the kingdom on their behalf as a boon the Goddess Padmāvati.70 _{These Gaṅga}

inscriptions establish a trope of the originating divine intervention of a charismatic monk and/or the Goddess Padmāvati that was taken up by several dynasties including the Raṭṭas of Saundatti and the Śāntaras of Huṃca. What differentiated these smaller regional polities from the Rāṣṭrakūṭas is their explicit invocation of Jainism in their epigraphical

praśastis that included: an opening invocation to the jinaśāsana (the teachings of the Jina) and/or syādvāda (the Jain doctrine of seven-fold prediction), a dynastic genealogy founded with assistance of a charismatic Jain monk, and, finally, devotion to and the benevolence of the Jain Goddess Padmāvati (often attended by generic devotion to the Jina or, more specifically, to the Tīrthaṅkara Pārśvanātha). For example, the praśasti of Nanni Śāntara includes the following Jain titles: “ornament of the great Ugravaṃśa,” [the lineage of Pārśvanātha], “obtainer of the boon from the Goddess Padmāvati,” and the “worshiper of the feet of the Jina.”71 _{Through this inscription and others like it, the}

70 _{Malini Adiga, The Making of Southern Karnataka: Society, Polity and Culture in the}

Early Medieval Period (Chennai, Orient Longman, 2006), 87-88.

Śāntaras and similar small-scale dynasties inscribed Jainism into their epigraphical self- presentation, demonstrating the formal ways which medieval dynasties of the western Deccan could be Jain.

It is not just the Vaiṣṇava language, but also the donative objects of

Amōghavarṣa’s inscriptions that contradict the image of his court as a deeply Jain literary milieu. There is simply no record of any form of direct patronage by Amōghavarṣa to the Jain community. Rather than attempt to transform this absence into a presence as other scholars have done, I suggest that we should instead grapple with the implications that come from reading literature and epigraphy together, taking the moments of disjuncture to be as illuminating as the moments of overlap. Without privileging one archive over another (important given that the medieval epigraphical record is so fragmentary and incomplete), I read the absence of Amōghavarṣa’s material patronage of Jainism as further corroboration that the Jain literature of his court intervened into rather than reflected reality in order to produce the image of an ideal Jain king at a moment when Jain Sanskrit literati were reaching outside of themselves to the court and the broader cosmopolitan world of Sanskrit.

Furthermore, when we read the Jain Sanskrit literature of Amōghavarṣa’s court alongside the inscriptions that emanate from his reign, we uncover quite disparate

representations of this king. Amōghavarṣa’s inscriptions offer an alternative vision of his power that was consistently articulated through the language of Vaiṣṇavism. This

language and image of the king were also taken up in Śrīvijaya’s Kavirājamārgaṃ

explored in the next section. While I will have more to say about the connection between the Rāṣṭrakūṭas and Vaiṣṇavisim there, I will begin here by noting that by this point

Vaiṣṇavism had become a language of power disaggregated, although not necessarily so, from the practice of Vaiṣṇavism itself. Epigraphs and, in particular, their praśastis also possess LaCapra’s “work-like” quality much like literature; epigraphy is just as

ideologically saturated as literature although the study of South Asian epigraphy has unquestioningly mined these sources for their documentary data.72 The difference, then, between Amōghavarṣa’s Sanskrit Jain literature and his Vaiṣṇava praśastis is not

necessarily in the contents they disclose (both are invested in forms of representation and religious affiliation), but in the origins of their production. Jain literati addressed

themselves to Amōghavarṣa in the linguistic idioms and genres of interest to the king and

the court, petitioning to be taken seriously and proposing a vision of cosmopolitanism with Digambara Jainism at its center. The circumstances of the production of royal inscriptions are far less clear. For the most part, it seems that literary and epigraphical poets came from different classes and that the process of inscriptional composition passed through many hands on the way from the court or king, to the poet, scribe, and, finally, onto the stone or copper plate. Unsurprisingly, such inscriptions more often than not bear what we might call the royal stamp of approval. Or, as Whitney Cox notes, “An

72 _{As Whitney Cox observes, “The epigraphic documents, eminently pragmatic}

instruments meant to subserve particular projects in a historically distant social and cultural order, were bound up in material and ideological contexts all their own, irrespective of the disciplinary proclivities of their modern interpreters.” Whitney M. Cox, “Scribe and Script in the Cālukya West Deccan,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47.1 (2010): 2. Cox gives several examples of how historians have approached inscriptions, but left out even in his account is the important reading of inscriptions as literary objects in their own right. In reading through the magisterial volumes of Epigraphia Carnatica, Epigraphia Indica, South Indian Inscriptions, etc… one cannot help but take note of the care and attention that early twentieth-century

epigraphists gave to inscriptions from dutifully marking their meters to attending to the resonances with literature. For example, see Kielhorn’s reading of the Aihoḷe inscription alongside Kāḷidāsa's Raghuvaṃśa cited above. F. Kielhorn, “No. 1—Aihole Inscription of Pulikesin II.; Saka-Samvat 556,” EI Vol. 6, 1- 12.

epigraphic text results from the intersection of several kinds of highly specialized labour and specialist knowledge, often… in the service of the instrumentalities of a premodern state.”73 _{That is to say, epigraphs reproduce standardized forms of royal representation}

across time and place—see for example the nearly identical language of the Sañjan Plates and the Konnur Inscription cited above—that seem to emanate from a courtly authority if

not the king himself. Therefore, if the Jain Sanskrit literature of Amōghavarṣa’s court addressed and fashioned the king as a Jain then the standardized Vaiṣṇava inscriptions of his reign are a form of self-fashioning that was specifically not Jain. However, as

inscriptions from dynasties like the Śāntaras show, Jainism had become a language of political self-fashioning for smaller regionally based dynasties of the western Deccan. Although Jainism was an available avenue for the regional articulation of power, Amōghavarṣa’s epigraphical praśastis specifically invoke the language of Vaiṣṇavism that, I argue, was a method to speak beyond a regional world of the Deccan in which Jainism was meaningful. If Jain literature from this period proposed a Jain

cosmopolitanism articulated through Sanskrit and was addressed to the king, then

Amōghavarṣa’s inscriptions suggest that Jainism had yet to become a to hand conceptual vocabulary for the translocal articulation of power.

5. The Path of the Poet-King: Kannada, the Kavirājamārgaṃ, and (Alternative) Visions of Rāṣṭrakūṭa Power

While Jain Sanskrit literati predominated in Amōghavarṣa’s court, they were not the only authors and Sanskrit was not the only available language. Śrīvijaya’s

Kavirājamārgaṃ, the first extant Kannada language treatise, presents a literary instantiation of a vision of Rāṣṭrakūṭa power that we find in the contemporary

inscriptions of the period. At the same time, this text also seems to reflect the presence of its Jain contemporaries in the court. However, the Kavirājamārgaṃ is less known as a text that was produced and participated in the literary environment of Amōghavarṣa’s court and, instead through the work of Sheldon Pollock, has become central to how we conceive of the vernacular millennium in premodern South Asia.74 Through the

framework of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyadarśa (and, to a lesser extent Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṅkāra), the Kavirājamārgaṃ imagines for the first time a Kannada speaking world mediated through, disciplined, and systematized by Sanskrit.75 Just as I propose that we view the

Sanskrit Cosmopolis as made and remade from discrete locals, so too should the

vernacular millennium be understood as knit together from a patchwork of different times and places. However, the commonality of the vernacular idiom (in which we identify forms of regional expression as a translocal phenomena) in some ways obscures the dramatically different or even incommensurable ways in which local languages became literary languages and, by extension, the equally different ways in which Daṇḍin’s

74 _{In the case of Kannada, the vernacular shift that Pollock identifies in this text is}

heralded through the union of “place” (dēsi), the local language of Kannada, and “way”