Abstract
This article focuses on the social existence of the Jain community, as exhibited in literary production in early modern India. The existing historiography sometimes tends to make Jain epistemology subservient to contemporary political culture. One must be cautious in approaching the tension between identitarian stability and identitarian volatility and between social textures and cultural mobility beyond the binarities of literary cultures and mundane survival with reference to our existing knowledge of Jainology. The volatile world of religiosity in early modern India tended to shape circumstances that both enforced and drew upon polemical meanings arising out of hybrid identities and cultural intermediacy. Therein lie diverse and multiple possibilities of literary discourse on the multiple religious identities at the core of the histories of Jainism in early modern South Asia.
Introduction
This article is a historiographical engagement with Sanskrit Jain prabandhas 1 in the multilingual social history of early modern India through an examination of multiple encounters involving people, institutions and texts. The prabandhas represent a genre of Sanskrit literature cultivated by the Jain literati and ascetic scholars, mainly in western India, from around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onwards. These centuries also witnessed substantial changes in the political and social order with the consolidation of the Delhi Sultanate. The subject matter of the prabandhas, written in Sanskrit prose and sometimes in verse, though at face value preaching philosophy and morality, often revolved around the concept of kingship, along with Jain ministers, elite religious specialists and their biographies. From the sixteenth century onwards, they were also composed in vernaculars.
The words ‘Jain’ and ‘Jainism’ became widely used only in the context of nineteenth-century communal movements in colonial India. 2 The organised attempt to explore the homogeny of Jainism is a legacy of the European knowledge discourse. The quest of European Indology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the Jain religion was part of the larger project to study the exotic Orient. The whole European knowledge discourse from the nineteenth century onwards was guided by a sense of exploration to make outward ritualism the basic index of ‘otherness’, limiting the philosophical content of selfhood in South Asian religions.
The discovery of almost the entire Jain canonical literature was as much the historical contribution of Orientalist scholarship as of the English and vernacular educated Jains influenced by the Orientalist trend; the interpretations and tone set by this colonial schema therefore continue to guide thematic invocations of Jainology even now. The understanding of Jainism as a philosophical heterodox tradition with simultaneously evolving sectarian organs, ethics and material contents carrying an inherent historicism has been constantly compromised due to the singular reading of the Jain prabandhas. The religion of the nirgranthas and jinas was engaged in debates and cohorts moving around ethics, identities and the nature of textual interpretation. Yet the absence of certain vocabulary and words does not take away the complexities involved in the temporal and spiritual formations in the Jain tradition.
Early Modern Jainology in Modern Historiography
The persistent diversity and internal conflicts of Jain tradition—at work even in the writing of Jain literature—were overshadowed by the quest of the European knowledge discourse for homogenous religious identities in Asia. In response to the European narratives, the Indian nationalists first reacted within what Partha Chatterjee has called the material/spiritual distinction condensed into an analogous but ideologically far more powerful dichotomy between the inner and the outer. The private sphere of culture had to be protected because only the culture belonged to you; the political and the social were being controlled by the colonial state. 3 Then developed an indigenous Indology, which was all about a ‘golden past’ of religion and its antiquity, domesticating European orientalism. This was the time when most Indic religions went through a reform–revival process to reinvent themselves—not just to compete with Christianity but also to maintain their relevance in changing circumstances. Colonial modernity applied the standards of Abrahamic religions to Indic religions; hence, the quest for a standard Jainism per se, and a search for homogeneity at par with Christianity and the ongoing inventions in Hinduism led by the Arya Samaj 4 and the rediscovery of Islam under Wahabi influence, led to formation of a puritan Jainism for both self and others.
In such circumstances, Jain literature was animated by tension between polemics and accommodation. How to persuade readers of the superiority of the Jain message by using locally appropriate vocabulary, style, genres and literary topoi while at the same time rejecting argumentative contradictory beliefs usually associated with that literature? To make an outward singular projection, it was necessary to find sites of homogeneity within. Scholars like Vijaydharmamuni, K.P. Modi, P.L. Vaidya, A.N. Upadhyaye, Babu Kamta Prasad Jain, C.R. Jain, H.R. Kapadia, Hiralal Jain, Nathu Ram Premi, 5 Jugal Kishore Mukhtar, 6 Muni Jinvijay, 7 Agar Chand Nahta, Bhanwarlal Nahta, 8 Puran Chand Nahar, 9 Mohanlal Dalichand Desai 10 and Mahopadhyaya Vinaysagar 11 not only wrote about various aspects of Jainology and Jain traditions, they refashioned the presentation of Jain textual heritage according to the contemporary milieu. These scholars were patronised by many Digambar and Shwetambar institutions through the publication of canonical and non-canonical texts. Here, the idea of homogeneity in terms of Jainology gets defeated not merely in descriptive terms of sources; it further gets defied when one goes through the content of the various texts and manuscripts produced across the millennium on behalf of various gacchas and institutions.
At this very moment, the colonised nation was being imagined as a religious nation carrying the baggage of the past. The historians of the ‘Hindu’ tradition, particularly Sri Ram Sharma, Makhanlal Roychaudhry and B.P. Saxena, brought into focus the atrocities committed by Muslim rulers on their non-Muslim subjects, including Jains. For them, the breaking of Jain idols, the banishment orders by Jahangir and other such issues formed the dominant topics. 12
The autonomous and extensive use of Jain literature for professional history writing in India began with post-colonial developments in the regional history of Gujarat. Two big names, M.S. Commissariat and Chimanlal Bhaulal Sheth, 13 introduced already known Sanskrit Jain biographical works to fellow historians. Commissariat who corroborated Mughal farmans with Jain prabandhas, while Sheth’s work on Jainism in Gujarat was heavily inclined towards Jain literary sources. As a retrospective nationalist projection, post-colonial Indian history writing did not offer space to literary, communitarian or religious ideas, so the Jain religious community was featured only in material terms or as part of comparative or composite culture. Historical works showed the Jain community either as victim of religious discrimination, beneficiary of Sulh-i Kul, or part of Indian business history. This trend continued in nationalist-Marxist historiography, where similar methods of corroborating Persian and Sanskrit sources were applied by Pushpa Prasad. 14 The Jain literary sources, especially Sanskrit prabandhas, have also made a major contribution to the writing of Indian business history. Surendra Gopal, 15 B.G. Gokhale, 16 M.N. Pearson, 17 Makrand Mehta 18 and Dwijendra Tripathi, 19 while dealing with trade and commerce in Mughal India, particularly in its western parts, brought to forefront the role of Jain merchants such as Virji Vora and Shantidas Jhaveri in the Mughal economy.
In the contemporary revisionist European scholarship, the Jain religious community largely remains a linguistic, sociological, anthropological and philosophical concern. Despite the arrival of interdisciplinarity, most of these studies have been engaged only with specific disciplinary purposes. How, then, are we to use Jain canonical literature and archives as a tool of larger historiographical methodologies to write the social history of late medieval and early modern South Asia?
All the above trends do not give Jain Sanskrit prabandhas the historical space to write social history or the history of Jains per se. The Jain sources usually take the linear route of religious history or spiritual appropriation in a propagandist sense. Whatever has been obscured in terms of the relationship between literary intransitivity and materialistic rationality requires to be put in a historical context. Here, literature is not merely a religious act but also a social, political and economic production. 20 Even before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, throughout the millennium, several attempts were made to define, revive and reform Jain philosophy. In this specific context, one must refer to Sanskrit Jain prabandhas to enquire about the encounters and circulation of religious traditions and actors. Before categorisation, it is important to look at the degrees of socio-religious mobility already existing in the multireligious context of the pre-British period.
Interpreting Vernacularisation
It is now well established that the early modern period of South Asian history can be characterised more or less as a period of vernacularisation. 21 This trend was part of the Jain literary culture of the period as well. Scholarship on Sanskritic courtly culture has tended to underline Mughal–Jain interaction. 22 However, there are enough sources and works to show that vernacularisation of literary writings was basically an attempt towards democratisation of religious philosophy and literary culture, which occupied ground that lay beyond imperial history. There is now a need to locate Jain sources from the viewpoint of democratisation and cosmopolitanism of the late medieval and early modern histories.
Throughout this period, two countervailing forces operated in the Jain domain. On the one hand, there was an urge to explore Jain philosophy and the spiritual world in order to express a cosmopolitan ideology and localise it to the level of indigenisation, and, on the other, there existed a distinctive organised monotheism that tried to maintain sectarian hegemony. We must simultaneously analyse these countervailing models rather than pursuing specific syncretic or cosmopolitan approaches or just tracing inter-sectarian conflicts. John E. Cort explains this argument in another context when he sees the relationship of the Jain tradition with non-Jains and even between sectarian groupings within the Jain tradition while analysing the issue of Jain tolerance. 23 One requires the recognition of both commonalities and differences simultaneously, rather than taking sides. 24 Historiographical methodology cannot attribute nor use the tag of an exclusive identity, as identity is neither permanent nor stagnant.
To explain this issue, one also needs to analyse the layers of human ‘self’ expressed both through societal interactions and across established religious communities. Though this division is largely categorised between sacred and profane, the picture is not so clear. One cannot make a clear distinction between the religiously sacred and the worldly and mundane. Here, one should raise the issue of ‘social existence’ of the scriptural texts, that is, the text should not be merely seen as the repository of religious knowledge and behaviour. The social location of the author, the text, the selection of the text and the audiences of the text determine the conditions of everyday social behaviour as well. Thus, the prevalence of the countervailing forces we referred to earlier is very much a product of the relationship between the texts, their authors and their social locations.
What Simon Digby described as the ‘multilocational nature of power’ should be taken beyond the prism of politics to explain the production and circulation of knowledge, both temporal and spiritual. 25 One requires appreciating that late medieval and early modern times saw considerable diversification and democratisation of both religious and worldly cultures.
The sources take us to everyday encounters for pragmatic engagements in specific local contexts rather than conscious systematic openness or moral obligation towards strangers. Rather than merely looking for an epistemological Jain morality as prescribed by R. Williams, 26 one could see the conditions and exigencies leading to the evolution of various practices across divisions, self-interest and self-identification among Jains.
Social change, developments in logic and theology and political upheaval all served at various points to intensify ideological divisions and public disagreements about the status of Jainism—both as a religion and a community. However, contemporaries also worried about the effects of vitriolic debate and about how to ensure that differences did not tear apart the bonds of assimilation or epistemological morality. A clash between notions of community and nascent individualism could be both a source of and a solution to these issues—both as a form of tolerance or a tool of exclusion. They could place people, groups and ideas beyond the bounds of hegemonic acceptability to provide a principle for counteracting fissures in society and ensuring a constant flow of knowledge.
This process was too far behind to crystallise into a demolition of hierarchies—social and political, and thus economic too. However, the cultural–religious phenomenon could make such claims because of the rise of strong Sufi and Bhakti movements and the emergence of powerful voices such as those of Ramanand, Kabir, Nanak, Raidas and Mira. Here, one must differentiate between historical memory and historical sources—these prominent names are more a property of popular memory than of archival sources. The pantheon of any organised religion in its attempt to establish hegemony would not transmit popular memory going against its institutional objectives, and here, I plead, Jainism has been a victim of such hegemonic trends in the writing of both its literature and its history.
Existing scholarship tends to forget the larger discourse of popular Bhakti–Sufi traditions essentially in vernacular forms during this period. Therefore, we have to situate the Sanskrit Jain sources vis-à-vis non-Sanskrit sources. A conscious adaptation from non-Jain sources is very much required to scrutinise the ‘strategy of inclusivism versus exclusivism’ as seen in ‘some inter- and intra-religious/sectarian debates between Buddhist-Jains and the Vedantins, and among the various sects of the Vallabhites’. 27 In the face of new challenges, there were many attempts to legitimise Jainism as open to external ideas and remain relevant in the ongoing religious and political conflicts.
By this time, the Vaishnavite tradition, particularly Pushtimarg, was quite active in Rajasthan and Gujarat. 28 The intra-religious discourse reflected in the Jain prabandhas, or the ‘linguistic return’ from Sanskrit to vernaculars, was a historical need where one could have constructed a specific religious identity for oneself. 29 The popular Bhakti–Sufi culture and intellectual discourse had become so competitive and contested that experimentation and reasoning moved beyond the homogeneity perpetuated by sectarian boundaries. In such a contested landscape, one had to be internally homogenous but outwardly cosmopolitan, as the Jain prabandhas suggest. The historical relevance of a micro-community like the Jains, in spite of their affluence and the royal patronage that they received, did not lie in a singular, aggressive posturing; rather, constant cosmopolitan engagement with others was the only way to be accepted and acknowledged in the larger historical narratives and imagery. Persian sources like the Ain-i Akbari of Abul Fazl, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri of Emperor Jahangir or the Dabistan-i Mazahib of an anonymous author corroborate the claims in the Jain prabandhas about a constant inter-religious dialogue rather than the narratives of only inter-religious and intra-religious conflict. This was not only an elitist discourse; even in the popular realm, the Dadupanthis were negotiating with Jain norms. 30
This negotiation is quite explicit in the domain of linguistic transactions. What Sheldon Pollock has interpreted as the decline of the hegemony of Sanskrit in the early modern period could be seen as a negotiation between Sanskrit and vernacular languages that is frequently visible in Jain literature. 31 It happened not merely because of the formation of new regional polities and the rise of regional languages, but also because of a very compact relationship between language and religion, moving together in search of new audiences. From the thirteenth century onwards, Jain literary production in the fields of hymnography and hagiography was trying to expand its social base to new spaces. In fact, the ‘linguistic turn in history’ has over possessed the discourse of history. Neither Sheldon Pollock nor his critics describe in detail the social resonance of this linguistic turn. However, as discussed earlier, this was a time of competing, multiple and multilayered religious identities. 32 Certainly, previous eras, too, saw religious competition. The late medieval and early modern periods were times of both sectarian and religious contradictions. Islam was not only a philosophical faith; it was also a political power. 33 Thus, one must situate the social and political context of linguistic processes.
The increasing exposure of Jain scholar-intellectuals to local and regional rivalries, and to the growing permeability between disciplinary and sectarian affiliations, led to the interplay of Sanskrit and the vernaculars. By the sixteenth century, intellectuals from organised religious identities found themselves engaging with the challenges of Bhakti devotionalism and Vedantic theology. The rising numbers of Mughal land grants to Vaishnavites in Mathura and Vrindavan 34 indicate this. Within Jainism too, scholars and sectarian champions pressed the formal disciplines of textual critique into the social realm to back their competing positions. 35 The multilayered challenge of Bhakti—its radical questioning of formal rituals and hierarchy, the charisma of its leaders, its growing influence at some royal courts and its popularity among the people—meant that even the most doctrinaire scholar-intellectuals could not remain indifferent to the call to worship in the vernacular. From the late seventeenth century, and for reasons that are yet unclear, there is evidence of a growing local demand for vernacular translations of the most influential digests of the prabandhas 36 to enable those with limited skills in Sanskrit to understand issues of theology and spirituality. In order to communicate their knowledge and message to lay followers, the Jain monastic order had to develop expertise in vernacular languages and literature as well. These and other considerations impelled some scholar-intellectuals to consider the vernacular as a suitable, even superior vehicle for their writing, again raising profound questions about identity, affiliation, hierarchy and authority.
Sites of Literary Production
Royal courts, including the Mughal court, provided a network through which scholars and talented men of letters could move and find patronage. The historical necessity to legitimise royal authority affected the intentions of patronage as well. Selection of texts like the Mahabharat and Ramayan for translation into Persian shows a quest for divine heroism. The Mughal court-centric Jain texts, too, were engaged in reciprocal legitimisation, 37 reflected in the depiction of Akbar as Ram. Scholars travelled across the subcontinent to defend intellectual and sectarian positions, very often using courtly networks. This could also mean that Jain intellectuals were writing in courts that were already sympathetic to their affiliations—where some members like Abul Fazl were already knowledgeable about Jain religious tenets, rendering it unnecessary to focus on theology and doctrine and to instead allow people like Tapa gaccha ascetic scholar Siddhichandra 38 to use poetry for broader aesthetic and moral cultivation in his text Bhanuchandraganicharit against the lure of temporal imperialism. It could also mean that Siddhichandra composed his text in an environment where decorum structured interactions were independent of religious affiliation and relevance, so that Jain epistemology did not lose its identity, and the authority of the temporal sovereign was also not undermined. 39 Similarly, Kriparaskosha written by Shantichandra of Tapa gaccha during his residency in the royal court in the last decade of the sixteenth century, attributes the great deeds of Akbar, like withdrawal of Jiziya, freedom to temples, freeing of prisoners, banning of animal slaughter for up to six months in a year and other such pious works, to the influence of the Jain Shashan and of the text itself. 40
In contrast, when Sanskrit hagiographical texts were produced for the dual purpose of accreditation and learning within the Jain sects, the Jain Sanskrit scholars envisaged their reader as someone who was not only learned in Sanskrit but also knowledgeable about the tradition of Jain literary production and the theological rubric that both the narrative and the reader were familiar with. The longer-term blurring of boundaries between philosophy and practice in the world of textual authorities and the growing acceptance of Jain hagiographical literature as a recognised part of the Jain dharma narrative opened new possibilities for interpretation and controversy. 41
As a milieu for scholar-intellectuals, however, it does seem to have had some distinctive characteristics. First, there seems to have been a frequent overlap and interplay between the formal intellectual disciplines of individual scholar-intellectuals and their sectarian affiliations. With their relative malleability as an oral tradition and their openness to local social circumstances, Jain prabandhas in particular provided a textual route through which scholar-communities and their formal intellectual concerns were posed against local disputes and rivalries.
The Jain orthodoxy was constantly trying to defend its turf as well as attack others. The classical language (Sanskrit) not only established elitist supremacy but also gave early modern Jainism authenticity in relation to its ancient past. 42 At this juncture, all the gacchas were competing against each other to trace their genealogy directly to Lord Mahavira, the founder of the faith. The Sanskrit writing style used by both the Jain monastic order and the laity pre-determined the narrative to suppress the voices of dissent; the texts generally remained normative, glorifying religious specialists and patrons. 43
The enormous increase in the volume and range of cheaper texts in circulation during these centuries was also due to the replacement of palm-leaf manuscripts by paper. Accusations of ‘forgery’ and philological defence of texts, particularly religious texts, became part of the repertoire of inter- and intra-sectarian disputation. The medieval Jain hagiographies are full of hostile statements about rival gacchas as well as Brahmanical sects, and frequently refer to great Jain teachers defeating heterodox Jain sectarians as well as Buddhists and Brahmans in debate. 44 Antipathy towards others is a subtle but constant feature of Jain prabandhas that needs to be investigated further.
The mundane applications beyond the epistemological positions are wider. From the thirteenth century onwards, there was a vibrant and dynamic trend within Jainism that was being shaped as a cosmopolitan philosophy rather than an orthodox religion. Engagements with rulers belonging to other religions, exchanges with trans-oceanic traders of other beliefs and interaction and competition with multiple religious identities as well as intra-religious characters are well reflected in the Jain prabandhas. 45 The flexibility and sociability of Jainism kept recurring in these narratives without much tampering with the philosophical core, which was being simultaneously revitalised, criticised and commented upon and enriched both in Sanskrit and the vernaculars.
Multilingual proficiency was a particular skill acquired by late medieval and early modern Jains. The erudite scholarship of many Jain ascetic scholars, like Jinprabha Suri and Siddhichandra, was also reflected in their linguistic acquisition, including in Persian; 46 even a commoner like Banarsidas 47 knew many languages. Discussing the destruction of Jain temples under the Sultanate, Jinprabha Suri in Vividhatirthakalpa tells shravaks (lay Jain followers) that this was bound to happen in kaliyuga. He advised Jains that rather than lamenting, they should look at the destruction of temples as an opportunity to earn punya by rebuilding them and constructing new ones. 48
When Shwetambar Jain mathematician Mahendra Suri, a courtier of Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq, was writing his manual about the astrolabe in Sanskrit titled Yantraraj, he was certainly borrowing from the ideas of Islamic astronomy available in Arabic and Persian sources. 49 Similarly, the influx of Jain vigyaptipatra 50 during the fifteenth–eighteenth centuries should be seen as part of a Jain literary culture emerging within the larger process of production of multilingual literature, in cosmopolitan Sanskrit and the vernaculars. 51
The founder of the heterodox Lonka gaccha, Lonka Shah, started his career as a scribe (lekhak) with expertise in calligraphy. He had a good rapport with the Muslim authorities in Ahmedabad; thus, rather than being treated merely as an ignorant manuscript copyist, his ideas against idol worship and opposition to certain Jain rituals were located in multilingual engagements and appropriations. 52
It has already been argued that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed a time of ‘intense dialogue’. 53 I would like to give specific examples of how this process across religious affiliations created a liminality where one had to guard one’s forte by distinguishing oneself from others, yet borrowing from others to keep oneself relevant. Tapa gaccha acharya Hiravijay Suri, an important producer, distributor and intermediary of knowledge, was not merely a sectarian leader of one of the most important gacchas of the Shwetambar Jains but also represented the Jain religious community at the Mughal imperial court. His role in translating the acts of the community into identity formation or acquiring and circulating available knowledge across the religious space of north-western India shows a constant endeavour to control and influence literary as well as mundane processes. This endeavour would not have been possible without multilinguality. However, when the moment of producing the hagiographical literature in his honour came, the language chosen for writing the prabandhas was Sanskrit. 54 This two-edged strategy or politics of literary production requires to be contextualised within the ongoing circle of elite vs. popular and classical vs. vernacular.
This dichotomy persisted throughout the early modern period. There was a constant engagement between classical Sanskrit knowledge production and popular lay education. However, this engagement was also the time of forming hierarchies as a deliberate move to control knowledge, the source of respect and power within the community. The Jains as a mercantile community had little stake in higher education. Banarsidas was advised by the elders of his community that bahut padhae babhan aru bhaat, banik putra to baithe haat, that is, learning is only for Brahmans and bards, a merchant’s son should sit at his shop. 55 Moreover, the language of most of the Jain scriptures and mode of education remained classical Sanskrit, which compromised the secular pursuit of knowledge, and made it just a means to explore the metaphysics of religion. The maintenance of the Sanskrit tradition prevented the legacy of Jain spiritual knowledge from reaching the Jain common masses. The use of vernacular languages (lokbhasha) was limited and looked at with contempt. The Tapa gaccha scholar Bhanuchandra wrote a Gujarati prose summary of Banbhatt’s Kadambari with the comment, Te katha ghanu kathin chai, Te matai mandbudhi nai preechhvaanai arthi sankshepai lokb hashai ye prabandh kidho chi (The story is difficult. Therefore in order that people of low intellect may understand it, I am summarising the story in the language of the people.) 56 The selection of the romantic Sanskrit text Kadambari or the chivalric genealogy of Mantrikaramchandravanshprabandh for translation into Gujarati shows an urge to engage with the vernacular public, though in a normative discourse of vertical interaction between royalty and subalterns. Yet, the contemptuous attitude of treating the vernaculars for people of low intellect (mandbudhhi) kept the traditional knowledge subservient and stagnant.
Maintaining hierarchies could have been an intentional act, but the times, in terms of day-to-day power relations, were changing rapidly. The Jain scholarship of this period, therefore, oscillated between two positions. On the one hand, there was the elitist, Sanskritistic leadership represented by Bhanuchandra, whose arrogance may have played a role in his failure to acquire leadership of the Tapa gaccha despite being favoured by the imperial Mughals. On the other hand, beginning with Jinprabha Suri, there were generations of an emerging scholarship in which both language and grammar were transformed and translated keeping in mind the audiences. Lonka Shah, Banarsidas and Yashovijay constantly worked in the direction of wider engagements.
The competition between knowledge and the quest for borrowing was so strong that segregated zones were constantly breached. Yashovijay Gani, a Shwetambar Jain ascetic from Baroda in Gujarat, had mastered the Jain shastras from his master Nayavijay, a high priest of Tapa gaccha, but wanted to study the higher branches of Sanskrit and the philosophy of logic (nyaya). Thus, in 1626 AD, he went to Benaras and stayed there for about twelve years. However, he could do so only in the disguise of a Brahman ascetic. 57
Such turbulence is explicit in the writings of Dharmasagar, a sixteenth-century Tapa gaccha intellectual who commented on the early scriptural and blasphemous views in Jainism to identify ten types of deviant Jain traditions: the Digambars, the Paurnamiyakas, the Khartargaccha, the Anchalgaccha, the Sardhapaurnamiyakas, the Tristutikas (or Agamikas), the Lonkagaccha, disciples of Kadua Shah, and Bijay as well as Parsvarchandra Suri—‘amongst the ten types of pseudo-Jains (jainabhasa), the Digambars, have been denounced by specific mention in the niryukti commentaries; the rest being necessarily (niamenam) been denounced by (implicit) description’. 58 The early seventeenth-century text Senaprashana also states that various heretics (nihnava) are still members of the Jain community (svapaksa). 59 It has been argued that the philosophy of ‘new reason’ (navyanyaya) amidst the plurality of distinct Indian philosophical systems motivated religious philosophers like Yashovijay Gani as a ‘pre-requisite intellectual value for engaging in public reason’. 60
However, our methodology has not taken literary sources from just the perspective of either knowledge or power networks. Such issues in many vaadas (debates) about ritualism and behaviour of followers as well as mendicants are well known in the existing historiography. 61 The circumstances or reasons behind such debates have not been discussed much, despite the acknowledgement that Jains were resorting to various methods ‘as a strategy for survival and growth’. 62 One also needs to enquire about the Jain scholars engaged in writing and translating into vernaculars. In the majority of cases, it was the lower-rung ascetics seeking promotion in the hierarchy who were engaged in this task. Change in the mode of writing followed the change in the status and objective of the writer.
Democratising the Knowledge
The democratisation of both spiritual and temporal epistemologies, if located in a larger context, appears as a historical requirement to maintain the validity of Jainism as a popular philosophy. If Hirasaubhagyakavya is a testimony to the Mughal patronage of the Jain community, the same Sanskrit text, along with many other vernacular sources, refers to mass conversions to Jainism in north-western India, particularly Rajasthan. This would not have been possible without vernacularisation of the Jain philosophy, which is explainable to the masses. Vernacular collections that explain the processes of conversion and popularity of Jainism are still not part of the mainstream list of Jain sources. 63 Many Jain families in Rajasthan still recall their Rajput genealogy. In Gujarat, many Jain families continue to swing between Jain and Hindu identities. 64 The example of the Jagat Seth family of Murshidabad underlines the point about Jain families acquiring a Hindu identity.
So, this cosmopolitanism was not only ascetic or religious; it was visible in the temporal domains of polity and commerce as well. From the early modern period, many Jain prabandhas and inscriptions use the term nauvittaka, literally getting wealth from ships, which refers to merchants operating in Surat, Cambay and other ports on the western coast. Their trading activities extended to the Arabian Gulf and Africa and led to a massive creation of surplus that came to be reflected in magnificent temple-building projects. 65
This was the time when Jagdu Shah, a Gujarati Jain merchant with trans-oceanic mercantile interests, constructed a mosque to facilitate the offering of daily prayers by his commercial Muslim partners. 66 Such cosmopolitanism in the field of commerce is also visible in the legacies of Shantidas Jawahir, Virji Vora and many others. 67 At times, such engagement was also seen in the case of Jain political elites, like Vastupal, who built nearly sixty-four masitis (mosques). 68
Writing prabandha for the purpose of constructing genealogy, and acquiring legitimisation, and divinity as the forms of power of a lay Jain is visible in a chivalric Sanskrit prabandha Mantri Karamchandravanshavaliprabandha, composed by a Khartar gaccha ascetic Jaysoma Upadhyaya at Lahore in 1593. (Sanskrit commentary thereon and Gujarati translation by his pupil Gunvijay in 1598 and 1599.) This prabandha celebrates the history of an elite Jain family, the Bacchawats, under the Rajput kingdom of Bikaner. The objectives for the production of this prabandha are multilayered. Throughout the text, there is a constant engagement with power. The text accepts the sovereignty of the Mughals not because of its being a political bulwark, but to defend the personal interests of the protagonist of the text, namely the regional political Jain figure Mantri Karamchandra Bacchawat of Bikaner. The text nowhere questions the aura of Mughal emperor Akbar, and Karamchandra’s subservience to him is acknowledged. Yet, it projects Karamchandra in such a fashion that even his patron Raja Rai Singh of Bikaner and the Mughal emperors remain on the margins of the text.
Being Jain could not be merely a ritualistic process, so being true to the philosophical content of the religion was more significant. Thus, Karamchand Bacchawat had to be charitable, pious, as well as large-hearted. Miraculous divinity and genealogy bring legitimacy, which in turn allows the Bachhawat family to grow out of the shadow of the Bikaner royalty and have an alternative autonomous identity. While on the one hand, Karamchand Bacchawat could come out of his regional and religious identity to play chess with Emperor Akbar, his religiosity had to be judged in terms of his contribution to the philosophical cause of the religion as well as to the community of believers. Thus, he was engaged by the Mughal court to arrange for certain Jain rituals to thwart inauspicious influences over a girl born in the royal house. 69 However, the moment one looks beyond the textual boundaries of Mantrikaramchandravanshavaliprabandha, the tensions between the Sanskrit narrative, vernacular sources and the historical memory of the Rathors of Bikaner are visible because the claims of the Jain Sanskritic narrative were simultaneously being contested in popular Rajput discourse.
This prabandha raises an important issue for historians, understanding the politics behind the production of text. Mantrikaramchandravanshavaliprabandha is an exploration of what I call ‘the voices of silence’. When things that one expects to find are absent in the texts, that silence is as important for historical reconstruction as what the text overtly tells us. The attempt here in this text is to locate those very silences with the help of other non-Sanskritic contemporary sources. The author of the text, Jaysoma, is not writing history but fulfilling the objective of his patron (Karamchandra) thus eulogising him and his genealogy. It is an attempt to glorify the patron against the royal house of Bikaner and Khartargaccha against Tapa gaccha. When the text is read in isolation, it eclipses historical sense and meaning and gives only literary perspective. It is up to the historians to use the text as history to separate myth and hagiography from history. Every text has its own authorial choices, logic, site and location of production and thus has its own history. It depends on the user (historian) which history is closer to his/her objective.
In social life as well, common men like Banarsidas shared and engaged with worldviews beyond narrow orthodoxies. Banarsidas could practise Saivism, perform occultism or change his sectarian identity. 70 The selfhood of being a Jain did not curtail his worldly exchanges with others. The use of Persian words and Hindu practices throughout Ardhakathanak indicates this trend of individualism beyond communitarian textualism. Using multiple prabandhas in relation to other sources as references for writing history is one method; expressing the world of a single prabandha for creating a discourse is another. The abuses and violence as well as reconciliation and democratisation had a very strong resonance and enforced both a redefinition of the ‘self’ and an understanding of the ‘other’.
Here, the Jain Sanskrit prabandhas seems to celebrate the role played by the authors and protagonists of the text in initiating the intercultural conversations necessary to transcend the political, geographical and cultural borders erected in the name of religion. Travelling across regions and engaging with other cultures has been a feature of most Jain prabandhas. Many writers themselves or through their protagonists who travel consciously seek to engage with or absorb alternative traditions in order to enrich their own imaginations and narrative voices. Here, one can check the possibility of using the term ‘transculturality’ to suggest the complex interconnections that result from this willingness to absorb other cultures, with writers and their protagonists not simply juggling different identities, but creatively mixing them together to form new, hybridised and polyvalent perspectives. The emergence of heterodox sects like Lonka gaccha or Adhyatam indicates such possibilities. 71 These sects, while holding the Jain ‘self’, embraced multiplicity, transcended boundaries and developed a new language, linking the crossing of boundaries with the development of a new language of power, which challenged hegemonic ideas about religion, region and state.
This pattern of formation of Jain identity through Jain prabandhas extends the argument of David Lorenzen about Hindu identity. 72 One can argue that early modern religious identity formation did not necessarily require an ‘other’, unless juxtaposition was sought in certain rare cases. However, present academic concerns are becoming more political, locating contemporary anxieties in the historical past. Selfhood was more philosophical in nature rather than ritualistic. In the Jain prabandhas, being Jain was usually an esoteric rather than an exoteric exercise. However, the everyday experiences of interaction were moments of acculturation, appropriation, hybridity and liminality. There is a need to look through the vent holes of sources.
The texts referred to in this work produce opportune moments of accelerated cultural contact. Our approach and method require caution while examining social encounters and the ways in which they were represented and negotiated. In this story, the period from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries is the time when people are trying to locate their spaces—not in opposition to others but in relation to others. This was not necessarily a syncretic discourse as syncretism is itself a debatable discourse. 73 Here, rather than finding the contours of religion, one requires to situate the context of social multiplicities. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent Jain Sanskrit narrative was that on several occasions, intra- or inter-sectarian conflicts escalated into personal reprisals and literary violence. Here, the role the Sanskrit Jain prabandhas played as cultural texts in constructing pragmatic spaces, where such oppositions could be challenged and cross-cultural engagement facilitated, is the site of writing new history. Indeed, all imaginative texts and practices are at heart a liminal force, employing metaphorical language, ambiguity and ingenious imagery to resist any attempt to control and limit ideas about culture and identity. The Jain poetic texts of this period demand a particularly engaged and active reading, which allows the development of a critical perspective towards the other, while simultaneously facilitating or challenging inherited meanings to encourage the creation of new insights.
However, the forms of knowledge created by Lonka Shah, Yashovijay and Banarsidas through contestations of the existing knowledge of Jain tradition were lost soon, and Jainology had to be rediscovered in the nineteenth century as part of Orientalist discourse. It was the decline of such contours that reasons out the colonial transformation of Jainism into an orthodox, introverted religion. If Jainism was ever eclipsed prior to the nineteenth century, it happened because of the urge to control knowledge through the classical language, Sanskrit. This argument bears testimony to the production of hundreds of Sanskrit Jain prabandhas between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in the realm of knowledge and identity.