Abstract
Lawrence A. Babb
Source: Courtesy Amherst College.
Lawrence A. Babb, better known as Alan, died on 21 November 2023. He was one of a generation of anthropologists, and scholars in related fields who transformed the study of South Asian religions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He studied for a BA in Anthropology at the University of Michigan and then did his doctoral studies in Social Anthropology at the University of Rochester, where his advisor was Alfred Harris (1919–2001). He conducted fieldwork in Chhattisgarh from August 1966 to November 1967. After finishing his dissertation, ‘Systemic Aspects of Chhattisgarhi Religion: An Analysis of a Regional Variant of Popular Hinduism’ (1968), he briefly taught at the University of Chicago. In 1969 he joined the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Amherst College, where he taught until his retirement in 2012. Amherst College celebrated his career that year with a symposium entitled ‘The Intersections of Religion, Society, Polity, and Economy in Rajasthan’ that brought together over two dozen scholars from India, Europe and North America (Harlan 2013).
Until the 1970s, most scholarship on religion in South Asia came from the pens of Indologists who studied and translated the great texts of the high traditions, or else from Christian missionaries, who combined discussion of ‘scriptures’ with some sketches of lived religious experience, with an eye toward enabling the mission enterprise. With only a few exceptions (notably M. N. Srinivas’s 1952 Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India), anthropological scholarship on religion in South Asia at the time either took the form of stand-alone articles or single chapters in monographs devoted to the study of a village or cluster of villages. A chapter on ‘the festival cycle’ or ‘rituals’ might be found side-by-side with chapters covering topics such as landholding, agriculture, caste, marriage and family, kinship and the village economy. Babb’s first book, The Divine Hierarchy (1975), was a marked change, as it was entirely devoted to an analysis of the religious beliefs and practices of a specific community.
Most earlier ethnographies in India focused on a single village as a bounded organic community, but Babb found that to understand the religious life of Chhattisgarh he needed to broaden his scope to encompass the entire region. He ‘sought to uncover certain basic conceptions in Chhattisgarhi Hinduism that are emergent in ritual activity as seen in selected contexts of observation’ (Babb 1975: viii). He characterised his subject as ‘popular religion’, the study of which involved looking at ritual activity ‘from the bottom up rather than the top down’ (Babb 2006a: 26). In a short essay entitled ‘The Study of Jain Traditions’, published in a Jain annual magazine in Jaipur, he explained what the study of ‘popular religion’ entailed (Babb 1997: 17):
Religious practice often—indeed usually—has different emphases from the philosophical or theological aspects of a religious tradition. How could it be otherwise? Most people are not philosophers or theologians. Thus, the study of popular religion is a somewhat different sort of endeavour from the study of religion as it is manifested in sacred texts and other writings.
Like many other scholars of Indian religion and culture at the time, Babb was particularly interested in ritual transactions. In part, this reflected the influence of the writings of Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), one of the founding figures in social anthropology, especially his 1925 Essai Sur le Don (The Gift) (1967 [1925]). In the 2006 essay entitled ‘From Hinduism to Jainism (and Back Again)’, in a special edition on ‘American Studies of the Jains’ in Jinamañjari—a small Jain journal published in Canada—he reviewed the early trajectory of his scholarly interests. He pointed to another, less well-known influence on his thinking: the American sociologist and philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Drawing inspiration from Mead’s posthumous 1934 work, Mind, Self and Society, Babb (2006a: 25) said that he ‘tried to develop the idea that transactions in worship can possess what one might call ‘soteriological efficacy’. He went on to explain, ‘Such transactions, I attempted to show, can provide a context in which a subject can develop a reconfigured sense of self by engaging in interactions, seen and felt as personally significant, with a divine transactional alter’ (ibid.). A third influence, evident from the very title of his first book, was the structuralism of Louis Dumont (1911–1988).
Babb continued his interest in ritual transactions in his next two major periods of fieldwork, in Singapore in 1973–74 and the Delhi area in 1978–79. The Singapore fieldwork resulted in four articles on the rituals of the Tamil community there. The Delhi fieldwork led to the 1986 book, Redemptive Encounters. In this volume, he provided detailed case studies of three belief systems, what he called in his subtitle modern styles of Hinduism. These were all guru-based traditions: the Radhasoamis, the Brahma Kumaris and followers of Sathya Sai Baba. This book alerted scholars to the rising importance of guru-based religious communities in urban (and now suburban) India. He also addressed a question that has continued to exercise scholars of Hinduism in the intervening decades, what he termed the ‘enduring puzzle’ (Babb 1986: 1) of how to characterise Hinduism. What ties together the different Hindu styles into a single religious tradition? There is no single unifying set of formal doctrines. Instead, he argued, there is a set of common themes—sometimes explicit, sometimes not explicit—that ‘impart to the tradition its characteristic inflections, and in so doing constitute a critical dimension of its living unity’ (ibid.: 5). These themes include a need to understand correctly one’s true identity in contrast to the false self-perception influenced by living in a fluid world, the role of divinity (especially the true guru) and divine-human transactional relationships in establishing correct recognition of identity, the sense that there is a history to such relationships and the ways that a relationship with the true guru can re-enchant the world.
In his 2006 essay, Babb said of his consistent attention to ritual transactions that ‘sooner or later an analytical trajectory such as mine was bound to raise the question of the meaning of ritual transactions in which the divine “other” or “alter” is seen as non-interactive’ (Babb 2006a: 25–26). His next extended fieldwork project, therefore, focused on the Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jains, in Ahmedabad in the summer of 1986 and in Jaipur in 1990–91. The resulting 1996 Absent Lord was one of the first book-length ethnographic studies of the Jains and helped reorient the study of the community in new directions. He contrasted the non-transactional ritual relationships between Jain worshippers and the Jinas with the highly transactional ritual relationships in the Śvetāmbar Khartar Gacch in Jaipur between Jain worshippers and the apotheosised deceased monks known as Dādāgurus (Cort 2024).
In both Redemptive Encounters and Absent Lord, Babb made a major methodological departure from older models of ethnography that emphasised participant-observation fieldwork among largely non-literate populations. The communities Babb studied in Delhi, Ahmedabad and Jaipur are highly literate. To come to an adequate understanding of their belief systems requires extensive reading in the many Hindi books and pamphlets that one finds on the bookshelves of these middle-class families. As he said in the introduction to Absent Lord, ‘Anyone who would understand Jain life must read what Jains themselves read’ (Babb 1996: 19–20). This emphasis on combining participant-observation fieldwork with close reading in the Hindi (or other vernacular) sources that members of the community read is now increasingly the norm in the study of lived religious experience in India.
As he recounted in his 2006 essay, his study of the Jains also led him from questions raised by Mauss about ritual transactions to questions about social identity raised by Mauss’s uncle Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) in his 1912 Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) (1995 [1912]) and then brought to bear on Indian religion by M. N. Srinivas. Babb credited Durkheim with ‘the insight that sacred symbols embody the identities of social groups’ (Babb 2006a: 28). This approach formed the basis of his fieldwork between 1996 and 2002 on the origin myths of six Hindu and Jain trading castes in Western India, and the 2004 book Alchemies of Violence. He analysed how the origin myths all involve the conversion of the castes (and in some cases their caste goddesses) from rituals that were centred on sacrificial violence to a ritual culture and a personal ethos that rejects such violence. The social position of trading castes in the middle of caste hierarchies, and therefore the very life of trade itself, is ‘fraught with ambiguities and vulnerabilities’ (Babb 2004: 14). The trader origin myths dealt with this tension by asserting that once upon a time the traders had been Rajput warriors, but that they had long ago chosen an identity centred on non-violence. Babb’s close attention to trader caste myths led him to an analysis ‘of myth itself as a repository of socially important knowledge’ and ‘the extraordinary degree to which myth can retain and transmit older meanings in a context of profound social change’ (ibid.).
In Babb’s final extended fieldwork-based research project, he turned from the social and cultural location of trading castes to the emerald gemstone industry which provided the economic underpinnings of some of the most successful trader castes in Jaipur. Researching family-run businesses is extremely difficult. Information is guarded carefully since interpersonal trust is essential for economic and social success. Babb could have attempted such a project only after two decades of experience in Jaipur. In Emerald City (Babb 2013), he investigated the histories of some of the most successful Jaipur gemstone families, and detailed all the levels within the industry, from the wealthy multinational traders, to Nyāriyās, members of the impoverished caste who sift the sludge emitted from workshops to recover minute specks of gold and silver. Not all important gemstone dealers have been Jain, but there has long been a special connection between the industry and Jainism in Jaipur. Analysing that connection led Babb to an interrogation of another of the founding figures of the sociology of religion, Max Weber (1864–1920), and the links between a life of trade and a lifestyle shaped by religious values centred upon nonviolence and vegetarianism in his 2020 article ‘Weber and the Jains’. Whereas earlier theorists had said that the Jain life of trade was necessitated by the nonviolent ethical code of Jainism, Babb argued that the life of trade had more to do with trading caste culture more broadly. Not all Jains are traders; many in Karnataka are farmers, and many Digambar Jains in Jaipur follow administrative careers based on literacy skills. Not all gemstone traders are Jains, as many are Vaiṣṇava. Babb argued, ‘The link is not between Jainism as a religious tradition and the conduct of business. Instead, it is a link between the conduct of business and a generic North Indian trading caste culture’ (Babb 2020c:139).
Alan Babb was a pre-eminent scholar. He was also a dedicated teacher, whose teaching career was at Amherst College, a small residential undergraduate college. He was a beloved teacher and mentor to generations of students. His attention to undergraduate teaching is evidenced by his last two books, both of which he wrote as college textbooks: Understanding Jainism (2015) and Religion in India, Past and Present (2020). When he wasn’t conducting fieldwork or in the classroom teaching, he was a longtime amateur shortwave radio enthusiast, and communicated regularly with fellow ham radio operators around the world. He was also a skilled amateur astronomer, who made his own telescopes and ground and figured his own mirrors. He was a wonderful colleague in the field, at conferences and over a shared meal. In the words of T. N. Madan, in an email he sent to me when he heard of Alan’s death, ‘he was one of the gentlest persons I have known’.