The Jain monuments of Hanamakonda

Anumakonda was a Jain centre before and under the early Kakatiyas. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 recorded several Jain sculptures cut into the rocks around Hanamakonda. M. Rama Rao describes numerous Jain sculptures on the hills round the old citadel.

Aggalayya Gutta is a hill at Hanamakonda with large Jain Tirthankaras carved on its rock faces. Writers date the carvings to the 9th to 11th century on grounds of style, and the sources consulted report no inscription on the hill. If these dates are right, the carvings are older than Kakatiya rule, or they come from the years when the Kakatiyas still served the Chalukyas. Local tradition names the hill after Aggalayya, a Jain muni, but no written source consulted calls Aggalayya a muni.

The 1961 Census of Warangal district describes a rock-cut image of a Jain tirthankara on the slope of the hill next to the Thousand Pillar Temple. The same census records a story that a Jain preacher named Jinadasaswamy was based where Hanamakonda now stands.

Inscriptions record a Jain royal physician named Aggalayya. A pillar inscription of 1034 at Saidapur records that Aggalayya built Jain temples at Mucchanapalli and Ikkuriki. Records of 1069 to 1074 from Medak district call him a mahasamanta and praise his wife. These records describe a layman and an official, not a monk, and none of them mentions Hanamakonda.

The Padmakshi temple stands on a hill at Anumakonda. An inscribed pillar before the shrine records that Mailama built the Kadalalaya basadi, a Jain temple, on the hilltop in 1117. Mailama was the wife of Beta, a minister of Prola II. A Tirthankara and his two attendant deities are carved on the rock inside the shrine. S. Gopalakrishna Murthy dates these sculptures to the Rashtrakuta period, and he credits Mailama with the tower and the hall.

The early Kakatiya chiefs gave gifts to Jain temples. The Sanigaram inscription of Beta I records a gift to a Jain temple. The Banajipet inscription of 1082 records a gift by Beta II to the Virakamala Jinalaya, a Jain temple built by the Polavasa chief Medaraja. Beta II and his sons also took initiation in the Kalamukha school of Saivism. Parabrahma Sastry reports a tradition that Prola II made Saivism the family religion.

The Padmakshi temple later passed from Jain to Brahmin hands, and the female attendant sculpture is now worshipped as Padmakshi, a form of Durga. H. Krishna Sastri wrote that nobody knows when this change took place. Gopalakrishna Murthy links the destruction of Jain shrines around Hanamakonda to Saiva hostility after the death of Mahadeva and under Ganapati Deva. P. Sreenivasachar, however, wrote that the stories of Jain persecution under Ganapati Deva have no reliable basis.

An inscription at Bekkallu shows Jain and Saiva worship in one family. A Mallireddi, whose family religion was Jainism, built twenty-one temples to Siva. The record says that the four faiths differ only on the surface and that god is one. Parabrahma Sastry's 1978 book places the record in the reign of Rudra Deva, but Epigraphia Telanganica dates it earlier, to the 11th century, under the Western Chalukyas.

The Siddhesvara Charitra, a poem of about 1600, describes many basadis round the fort of Hanumakonda. In the poem, Tikkana defeats the Buddhists and Jains of Anumakonda in debate in the reign of Ganapati Deva. The basadis of the Jains are then pulled down, and the Jains are killed. The editor of the poem, K. Lakshmi Ranjanam, rejects this story and holds that Jainism declined on its own.