Book Title: ISJS Jainism Study Notes E5 Vol 01
Author(s): International School for Jain Studies
Publisher: International School for Jain Studies
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was due to ethnic revivalism and not due to any change in their fertility behavior. Therefore only the next census report would be able to confirm the slow growth rate trend decisively. Logically, the affluent minorities of the world such as the Jews and the Parsees share the predicament of demographic stagnation and decline in the long run and the Jains appear to follow the same trend.
1.4 Economic Status The relative affluence among the Jainas has been noted by a number of scholars (Weber 1958; Hardiman 1996; Stevenson 1915). This is so due to the fact that they are mainly engaged in trade, commerce, and professional occupations. Thus according to the 2001 Census, only 18.3% of the Jain population is engaged in "working class" jobs (11.7% cultivators, 3.3% agricultural laborers, 3.3% household industry workers); the rest, that is, 81.7% are in "other" occupations. Not surprisingly, the Jainas have varyingly been described by various scholars as "the Jews of India", "the middlemen minority", "the marginal trading community", "the capitalist without capitalism”, etc. Two contradictory explanations can be offered in this regard. One is the Weberian in terms of the Protestant ethic thesis. Weber maintains that there is a positive relationship between Jainism and economic motivation". Weber seems to suggest that although Jainism is spiritualized in the direction of "World renunciation", some features of inner worldly asceticism are also present in it. These are reflected in such virtues as thriftiness, self-discipline, frugality, abstention, economy of time etc, which eventually promotes savings and accumulation of wealth. The other is the Marxist explanation in which the historically-evolved predominantly petty bourgeois class position of the Jainas vis-a-vis the dependant, impoverished mass of the Indian peasantry and its exploitation by the former can account for the prosperity of the Jainas. Unfortunately hardly any work has been done along these lines although both the perspectives offer a number of hypotheses for systematic studies.
1.5 Social Organization In spite of being a small community, contestations and confrontations have not been lacking among the Jainas. Thus the Digambara sect displays individualistic prophet-derived and sect-like character in contrast to the “vetāmbaras Jainism that shows the group-bound, priest-derived and Church-like ambience. Although Jainism does not sanction caste system, for more than a millennium the Jainas have been divided into a number of sects and subsects and castes and sub-castes. However, the caste system is not as rigid as among the
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