Jainism also spread in the south of India and before our era it had a strong hold in Tamil lands, but our knowledge of its early progress is defective.  According to Jain tradition there was a severe famine in northern India about 200 years after Mahavira’s death and the patriarch Bhadrabahu led a band of the faithful to the south[273].  In the seventh century A.D. we know from various records of the reign of Harsha and from the Chinese pilgrim Hsuean Chuang that it was nourishing in Vaisali and Bengal and also as far south as Conjeevaram.  It also made considerable progress in the southern Maratha country under the Calukya dynasty of Vatapi, in the modern district of Bijapur (500-750) and under the Rashtrakuta sovereigns of the Deccan.  Amoghavarsha of this line (815-877) patronized the Digambaras and in his old age abdicated and became an ascetic.  The names of notable Digambara leaders like Jinasena and Gunabhadra dating from this period are preserved and Jainism must in some districts have become the dominant religion.  Bijjala who usurped the Calukya throne (1156-1167) was a Jain and the Hoysala kings of Mysore, though themselves Vaishnavas, protected the religion.  Inscriptions[274] appear to attest the presence of Jainism at Girnar in the first century A.D. and subsequently Gujarat became a model Jain state after the conversion of King Kumarapala about 1160.

Such success naturally incurred the enmity of the Brahmans and there is more evidence of systematic persecution directed against the Jains than against the Buddhists.  The Cola kings who ruled in the south-east of the Madras Presidency were jealous worshippers of Siva and the Jains suffered severely at their hands in the eleventh century and also under the Pandya kings of the extreme south.  King Sundara of the latter dynasty is said to have impaled 8000 of them and pictures on the walls of the great temple at Madura represent their tortures.  A little later (1174) Ajayadeva, a Saiva king of Gujarat, is said to have raged against them with equal fury.  The rise of the Lingayats in the Deccan must also have had an unfavourable effect on their numbers.  But in the fourteenth century greater tolerance prevailed, perhaps in consequence of the common danger from Islam.  Inscriptions found at Sravana Belgola and other places[275] narrate an interesting event which occurred in 1368.  The Jains appealed to the king of Vijayanagar for protection from persecution and he effected a public reconciliation between them and the Vaishnavas, holding the hands of both leaders in his own and declaring that equal protection would be given to both sects.  Another inscription records an amicable agreement regulating the worship of a lingam in a Jain temple at Halebid.  Many others, chiefly recording grants of land, testify to the prosperity of Jainism in the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar and in the region of Mt Abu in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[276].  The great Emperor Akbar himself came under the influence of Jainism and received instruction from three Jain teachers from 1578 to 1597.