Jainism in South India

This work is the continuation of my post-doctoral work Dravidian Borrowings From Prakrit Languages, done in the International school of Dravidian Linguistics, Thiruvananthapuram, which is proposed to be published soon. During that work, which is an attempt to survey Prakrit loan words in the major Dravidian languages. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. It was evident that the early Jainas had done much for the improvement of the language and culture of the Dravidians. In the present work, there are two parts; the first is devoted to the assessment of the contribution of South Indian Jainism to various fields of human life while the second is an overview of Jainism, to help the reader understand the first part properly. When a technical term in the first part, related to Jaina Monasticism, Jaina Ethics, Jaina Psychology, etc. is found unfamiliar, the reader may please look up in the concerned chapter in the second part. The entries are given in English alphabetical order. A number of vernacular forms occur in the text, which have to be marked with diacritics to help the reader understand the pronunciation. In a section, the first occurrence is given with ordinary spelling and then, within brackets, the word marked with diacritics, sometimes having a slightly different spelling, is given. In the next occurrences before the following bibliography, only the English spelling is given. For this purpose, the portion between two bibliographies is to be taken as a section. The bibliography is given after each article and sometimes after a gloss (with page numbers of the portions referred to). A few articles written by scholars have been included. The title of such articles is given in capital letters and at the end, the name of the contributor is given. In an entry, there may be words given in bold letters, which indicates that such words appear as head-words in the same chapter or elsewhere. A word index and a general bibliography are given at the end.