The Kalabhras and the Age of the Ascetics

The Kalabhras occupy one of the most enigmatic chapters in South Indian history, a dynasty or people who overran the Tamil country in the middle of the first millennium CE and whose period is often called a dark age because of the scarcity of records. In the historiography of the region, the Kalabhras have frequently been associated with the patronage of the heterodox faiths, Jainism and Buddhism, and their age has been seen as one in which these traditions flourished at the expense of the older order.

Following the decline of the early Tamil kingdoms of the Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas in the centuries after the Sangam age, the Kalabhras are said to have swept across the Tamil-speaking lands, displacing the established dynasties and holding power for a considerable period, perhaps from around the third or fourth to the sixth century CE. The sources for their rule are meagre and often hostile, deriving largely from later inscriptions and literature that portray them as disruptors of the traditional Brahmanical and royal order.

The traditional characterisation of the Kalabhras as patrons of Jainism and Buddhism rests in part on later accounts that condemn them for withdrawing grants to Brahmins and temples and for favouring the shramana religions. Some literary traditions associate rulers of the period with Jainism or with support for Jain and Buddhist institutions. On this basis, historians have often interpreted the Kalabhra age as one of ascendancy for the heterodox faiths in the Tamil country, coinciding with the broader flourishing of Jainism in the south evidenced by cave shelters, sculpture and literature.

Modern scholarship, however, urges caution. The evidence concerning the Kalabhras is fragmentary and much of it comes from sources written by their opponents or long after their fall, so the picture of them as single-minded champions of Jainism and Buddhism may be oversimplified. Their origins, the extent of their territory, the length of their rule and the precise nature of their religious policy all remain matters of scholarly debate. What is clear is that their period coincided with a time when Jainism and Buddhism were strong and influential in the Tamil country.

The end of the Kalabhra interregnum came with the resurgence of the Pandyas in the far south and the Pallavas in the north of the Tamil region, around the sixth and seventh centuries CE. This revival of the traditional dynasties was accompanied by the rise of the Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti movements, whose devotional saints mounted a fervent challenge to Jainism and Buddhism. The overthrow of the Kalabhras thus marked not only a political restoration but the beginning of the reversal of fortune for the heterodox faiths in the Tamil country.

For the history of Jainism, the Kalabhra age represents, in traditional understanding, a high point of influence in the Tamil south, a period when the faith enjoyed favour or at least a congenial environment before the devotional Hindu resurgence transformed the religious landscape. Whether or not the Kalabhras were as devoted to Jainism as later polemic suggests, their era belongs to the centuries during which the Samanars, the Jain ascetics, were a commanding presence in Tamil religious and literary life.

The Kalabhras thus remain a shadowy but suggestive presence in Jain history, emblematic of the strength of the tradition in the ancient south and of the obscurity that shrouds so much of that early flourishing before the coming of the bhakti age.