Contribution of Jainas to Sanskrit and Prakrit Literature

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

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Recent Fieldwork Studies of the Contemporary Jains
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of the Jain nun Kavunti in the Tamil classic silappadikāram, while Leslie Orr (1998, 2000b) uses medieval Tamil inscriptions in a thought-provoking study to show that the role of "women religious" was not restricted to initiated nuns, but encompassed a wide range of lay women teachers hitherto unknown in Jain studies. Savitri Holmstrom, in a 1988 social anthropology M. A. thesis from the University of Edinburgh, provides an excellent study of Svetāmbar Terāpanthi nuns that is enriched by her travel with a group of nuns. She investigates the contradictory discourses of power in the case of these nuns. While social and economic power serve to emphasize female subordination and dependence, religious power emphasizes both the nuns' embodiment of sakti or creative power and the broader Jain notion of the autonomy of each soul that is seeking the spiritual omnipotence found in liberation.
Anne Vallely (1999) expands what we know from Holmstrom's work in her ethnography of Terapanthi women renouncers at Ladnun, the headquarters of the sect. She provides rich details of the training of the renouncers, their ritual and social interaction with laity, and their devotional interaction with the leaders of the order. The dissertation-in-progress by Sherry Fohr at the University of Virginia will further expand the focus on Jain women renouncers to include the other Jain sects. The powerful attraction of the renunciatory life for Jain women is also seen in a fine 1986 film by Paul Kuepferle. In addition to several interviews with prospective Svetämbar Mürtipujak nuns in Gujarat, this filmo concludes with the initiation (dīksā) of a nun.
The essential starting point for any study of Jain nuns is still N. Shântâ's magisterial 1985 La voie jaina (English translation 1997). This rich book is the result of more than a decade of textual and fieldwork research. Shântâ presents the Jains not as viewed by two centuries of Western (and Indian) Jainology, but rather as the Jains see themselves; and the depth of her knowledge means that she is largely successful in presenting this "view from the inside.” Her starting point is not textual presumptions concerning the life of nuns, but rather the lived experience of a number of important and charismatic contemporary nuns of all four traditions. Her detailed descriptions of the nuns' daily routines and the textual understandings of those routines are excellent, if focused perhaps too much only on those practices for which there is sufficient textual prescriptions. She also presents short biographies of six modern nuns, allowing us insight into the way these women understand themselves, and the ways in