Author: Ravindra K Jain
Publisher: Indian Institute of Advanced Study
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 122
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185952647
Description
This pioneering sociological account attempts to gain an understanding of the socio-religious life of the Jains of North India by experimenting to interweave form and content through a reliance on diverse sources of information, techniques and points of departure resulting in a collage.
How does one gain an understanding of the socio-religious life of a group of believers in contemporary India (in which group the author himself is an occasional practitioner) and communicate it to readers who may be largely unfamiliar with it? This pioneering sociological account of the Jains of North India addresses the question by experimenting to interweave form and content through a reliance on diverse source of information, techniques and points of departure resulting in a collage. The challenge here is to provide an outline of contemporary Jainism within the context of a self-conscious community of adherents and, at the same time, to account for the small change of imbricated commercial and ritual transactions in their everyday life. This is met by a concise narrative of the beginnings, history, schisms, social organization and cosmology of the living Jain tradition. There is no imposition of a metaphysics on this narrative and the chapters follow one another in an engaged probe into the meaning (metaphor) and social structure (community) of north India Jainism today.
Contents
Preface
CHAPTER 1
Atheistic Jainism?
CHAPTER 2
Textual Sources and Ethnographic Literature
CHAPTER 3
The Grand Transition in Jainism: Digambar and Shvetambar as Continuity and Change
CHAPTER 4
The Shvetambar ‘Church’
CHAPTER 5
The Digambar Case Reconsidered: Contemporary Period
CHAPTER 6
The Digambar Jains of North India: Society and Religion in Baraut, Uttar Pradesh
CHAPTER 7
The Kanji Swami Panth; Contestation, Cosmology and Confrontation
Bibliography