254 MANUAL OF THE NILAGIRT DISTRICT. 



CHAP. XI. century was Jain and so continued till the eleventh. The K'alachnrya 



kings of the twelfth century were Jains, and the Hoysala Bellala kings 



History, ^o Vishnu Varddhana belonged to the same faith. The conversion of 



this monarch to the Vaishnava faith in 1117, and the establishment of 



the Lingayet form of Siva faith at Kalyana about 1160, put an end to 

 Jain predominance in Mysore as a state religion, though the Vijayanagar 

 kings extended a partial favor to it, especially in Kanara and the west." 

 Ml/sore Gazetteer, Vol. 1, page 371. 



How near the Jain cult approached the Nilagiris is evidenced by 

 the fact that one of the seats of Jainism was Maleyur near Grundel- 

 pet on the road from the Nilagiris to Mysore^ and was the birth- 

 place of Akalanka referred to above^ who procured the expulsion of 

 the Buddhists from South India. The absence of traces of Bud- 

 dhists and Jains in the Nilagiris tends to show that these mountains 

 were but sparsely populated during their supremacy, and further 

 that though the Toda customs have some strange resemblance to 

 those of these religionists, yet they would appear to be anterior 

 to the formulating of their creeds. 



But before the fall of Jainism the old lingam or phallic worship 

 of the ante-Aryan races, which had been developed in the north 

 to an organized cult under the name of Sivaism, continuing the 

 worship of Siva, the destroyer, and of Diirga, the earth-mother, 

 known also as Parvati or Bhavani,^ had been revived. In the 

 south this regenerated religion was preached by Sankya Achdrya, 

 the apostle of Sivaism and the founder of the Smarta sect. He 

 was a native of Cranganur in Malabar, and belonged to the tribe 

 of Namburi Brahmans. His era was about the eighth or ninth 

 century A.D. His work was the abolition of Jainism and the 

 reformation of the Brahmans. Professor Wilson ^ remarks : — 



" It has been already observed that the prevalent division of the 

 Hindu faith in the earliest period of its establishment appears to have 

 been the worship of Siva, and the traditions of the different countries 

 corroborate this view ; for the tutelary divinities of both the Pandyan 

 and the Ghoia kingdoms were forms of that deity or his bride. In 

 Telingana the first princes are reputed to have been Vaishvava, hut 

 this is the only division in which that faith predominated. In course 

 of time however — probably by the seventh or eighth century — a variety 

 of modifications existed, to reform which Sankara Achdrya, it is 

 related, was born. He did not attempt to abolish all the varieties of 

 the Hindu faith, but whilst he recalled the attention of the Brahmans 

 to the tenets of the Vedas and the injunctions of the inspired legis- 

 lators, and thence founded the division known in the south as the 

 Sinartal Brahmans, who disclaim, although they may practise, the 

 exclusively preferential worship of any form of the Supreme Deity, he 

 gave his sanction to the continuance of certain sects, over whom 



' Compare Talboys Wheeler, Vol. Ill, p. 364. 

 Descriptive Catalogue, Vol. I, p. 61. 



