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The Jain Scripture and Community : The Scholarly Legacy of Kendall W. Folkert
• Paul Dundas
Note : The following short essay is an emended version of a section of a review article which was originally published under the title "Recent Research in Jainism" in Religious Studies Review 23, 1993 in tandem with a complementary piece by John E. Cort entitled "Recent Fieldwork Studies on the Contemporary Jains." It is to be hoped that this account of the researches of Kendall Folkert, who loved both Gujarat and its Jain community greatly, will commend itself to the attention of the distinguished dedicatee of this congratulatory volume.
When Kendall Folkert was killed at the age of 43 along with the promising young postgraduate anthropologist Thomas Zwicker in a crash on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in October, 1985, he was the only scholar in the English-speaking world that time carrying out advanced scholarly research into both the Jain community in India and its scriptural and intellectual tradition.
Over the course of the century or so subsequent to Western scholars having identified it to their satisfaction as an independent religious path with ancient origins, Jainism was largely the subject of library-based investigation only and, with one or two notable exceptions such as Norman Brown and R. Williams, its main interpreters were continental European philologists. The most prolific of British Sanskritists, A. B. Keith, who produced studies of virtually every significant aspect of classical Indian culture, steadfastly ignored Jainism, and on the one occasion when he had to confront its literature in the course of producing a catalogue of manuscript holdings in the India Office Library, flaws in his knowledge of the subject were apparent (Schubring 452-3).
For virtually all of the western scholars who interested themselves in
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