Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

Author(s): Vasantkumar Bhatt, Jitendra B Shah, Dinanath Sharma
Publisher: Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi Ahmedabad

Page 126

Recent Fieldwork Studies of the
Contemporary Jains
John E. Cort
This essay is a slightly revised and updated version of a review-essay that originally appeared in Religious Studies Review in 1997. This journal itself is difficult of access in India, and many Indian scholars of the Jains are probably unaware of the full range of scholarship discussed in the essay. It therefore seems most appropriate to present it in an Indian context in this volume in celebration of the scholarly achievements of K. R. Chandra, a man whose scholarship has always given evidence of the importance of cooperation between scholars in India and abroad.
As recently as 1986 it was possible to write, "there has been a great lack of descriptive studies of the contemporary Jainas" (Cort 1986 : 180). In the past several years, however, this situation has been significantly rectified, in large part due to the publications of a handful of anthropologists in Great Britain, several fieldwork-based studies by French and German scholars, and, increasingly, fieldwork-based studies by North American scholars. In this essay I will survey this literature, organizing it under the two broad themes of Jain social organization and Jain ritual. While there is extensive overlap between these themes, such a division will allow us to see some of the distinctive features, as well as some of the omissions, of the recent research. It will also become apparent that my discussion is not limited strictly to research based on fieldwork, but is expanded to cover historical and literary studies that take as their starting point the same focus as fieldwork, i.e., Jainism not as an abstract set of ideas or beliefs, but as the lived experience of those people who have in various tinies and places called themselves Jains. These textual and historical studies provide a diachronic depth to the largely synchronic field studies. Given the volume of scholarship in the past decade and a half, this essay is more a descriptive survey of the field than a detailed analysis of the specific works