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