included archetypal Kshatriya warriors, the great Rajput lineages.
     Gujarati Bania (merchant) castes made their version of Vaishya
     culture Jain, a cultural phenomenon with its origins in the mixed
     patronage of medieval dynasties.
Deccan and South India
  •  In the peninsula, medieval worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu displaced
     Buddhism and Jainism from the cultural prominence they enjoyed in
     late ancient and early medieval times, especially in Madurai and
     Kanchipuram.
  •  Pockets of Jainism remained, however, and all along the peninsular
     coast, most prominently in Kerala, Hindu kings patronised diverse
     merchant communities that were essential features of life along the
     Arabian Sea coast, including Jains, Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians,
     and Jews.
  •  Arab Muslim settlements received patronage from non-Muslim rulers
     all along the peninsular coast, as they did across the Palk Straights in
     Sri Lanka.
  •  Inside medieval Hindu cultural environments, trends in popular
     religion indicate the increasing influence of religious feelings of a
     distinctly non-brahmin kind that first achieved prominence in temple
     worship farthest from the original home of classical brahmin
     orthodoxy.
  •  In the far south, from the eighth century onward, non-brahmin
     cultural activists took the lead in spreading Shiva and Vishnu worship
     in the old Dakshinapatha by inventing devotional (bhakti) worship
     that valued emotion above knowledge, discipline, and ritual; by
     composing vernacular verse in Tamil, not Sanskrit; by promoting
     female saints and mass participation in deity worship; by giving
     devotees a direct relation to god independent of Brahminical
     mediation; by making low caste status respectable in the eyes of god;
     by praising poet saints over brahmin gurus; and by creating
     pilgrimage places rooted in local traditions.
  •  Bhakti poets produced a new style of emotive, popular cultural