The Universe as Audience- Metaphor and Community Among the Jains of North India

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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 sources 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 Indian Jainism today.

RAVINDRA K. JAIN is currently Professor of Sociology/Social Anthropology and former Dean, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was University Lecturer in the Social Anthropology of South Asia and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University (1966-74). He has held teaching and research assignments at the Australian National University, Canberra; University of New England, Armidale; University of Durban-Westville, S. Africa; University of the West Indies, Trinidad; University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, and the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, Mauritius. Elected T.H.B. Symons Fellow in Commonwealth Studies in 1996, Professor Jain is a recognized international authority on Indian diaspora. His published works include South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya, Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 1970; Text and Context: The Social Anthropology of Tradition, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, 1978; and Indian Communities Abroad: Themes and Literature, Manohar Publishers, New Delhi, 1993, besides a large number of research papers in national and international journals.

The text presented here is in the nature of a collage. The readings and interpretations based on secondary sources have been validated and supplemented-almost by the compulsions of the author as an anthropologist-by encounter with co-religionists 'out there' in the field. My effort in this book is to combine in the progression of producing it, rather than by premeditated design, an internal with an external point-of-view (cf. Dumont, 1966). Technically, the collage- effect in the end-product seems to me to lie in the heterogeneity and 'rawness' of the sources used-histories including mediaeval texts, contemporary writings in Hindi and English, the autobiography of a Digambar Jain recluse, a short spell of fieldwork and the synoptic delineation of a contemporary schism as the resonance of schisms in the longue durée of Jainism. The practice of collage also produces a juxtaposition of macro and micro views of the Jains and Jainism in North India. My practice is similar to Clifford's defense of collage in ethnography:

Collage brings to the work elements that continually proclaim their foreignness to the context of presentation. The ethnography as collage would leave manifest the constructivist procedures of ethnographic knowledge; it would be an assemblage containing voices other than the ethnographer's as well as examples of 'found' evidence, data not fully integrated within the work's governing interpretation. Finally, it would not explain away those elements in the foreign culture which render the investigator's own culture newly comprehensible (Clifford 1981).

The title of this book is a conscious obverse of a pioneering and erudite collection of essays on Jainism published in 1991 as 'The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society. That title referred to the key icon of Jainism-the samavasarana-from the outside. As the readers of my text would readily recognize, I use that work alongside other writings by foreign authors on Jainism quite comprehensively, thus incorporating the largely external point-of-view (with the exception of papers by Lath, Jaini and Singhi in the 1991 volume) of our western interlocutors. My choice of using the same metaphor of samavasarana internally and, hence, 'Universe as Audience', has been prompted by the significantly dialogical situation characterizing the Assembly. It is remarkable that in its original conception the sermon by the tirthankar is in the form of an unintelligible sound celestial (divyadhvani) which is interpreted for the benefit of the linguistically heterogeneous collectivity of listeners by the tirthanker's factotum (ganadhar). This epitomy of sound being transformed into intelligible speech by a qualified interpreter is, to my mind, an apposite representation of the internal-cum-external dialogical activity that native anthropology & anthropologists engage in. The 'metaphor' in my title refers broadly to the beliefs and cosmology of Jainism while the obvious reference to Jain practitioners is in the form of a 'community' of believers.