Jain Journal 1972 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 12

132
Madam Guseva's work starts with a chapter on Indian ethnography which is as complex as the country's social history, but there is nothing much about it that may be called Jaina. This discussion would perhaps have gained a little more in scientific content, but for its too much reliance on a purely political work by Comrade S. A. Dange. Ancient India had no slavery, not even a semblance of it, and no where in the vast Indian literature does one come across a line as one has in Plato as well as Aristotle that slavery as an institution was 'natural' to society; nor had ancient India communism, as it did not exist in any other country then and as a concept, it arose only in the 19th century. What happened in India is,-assuming this with those who believe in the Aryan infiltration from outside, though, it must not be lost sight of, there is no less dominant a view that the Aryans were indigenous to the soil, that with the movement of the Aryans from the Indus Valley and may be at the time of coming to this valley as well-they encountered local peoples everywhere with whom there was an assimilation. The process might have worked over centuries and millennia, no one can be dogmatic about it, but at the dawn of history, not only assimilation but also social stratification was complete, and there was no more ferment left anywhere. One may clearly understand that Madam Guseva's interest is to hit upon an arrangement, if possible, in which she could discover elements of class antagonism and class war. It is true that the Aryans assimilated peoples of other ethnic groups in the category of their working population, the sudras; it is further true that the Aryan society itself divided from within into classes, the brāhmanas, the ksatriyas, and the vaisyas or the wise, the warring and the wealthy; but at no time was there class antagonism or class war among them in the sense in which these expressions have been used by Marx. Not even the eternal feud between the brāhmaṇas and the ksatriyas can be given a 'class' explanation.
JAIN JOURNAL
The historical root of Jainism is thus lost in antiquity and the existing evidence, literary or otherwise, is not enough to take us to that period in which Jainism might have been born. While there is dispute regarding Vedicism as to whether it was created by an indigenous population or by a migrating population, Jainism is a product of the Indian soil. Some Jaina scholars have gone to the length of claiming that the Indus Valley Civilisation was an earlier form of Jaina civilisation. As to ethnical roots, the Jainas at least claim that they are of the Aryan stock and are not non-Aryans who have been identified as a distinct class who later came with the Aryan fold as the sudras. But the whole thing is a disputed territory and must be left to the scholars to resolve, before anything final or conclusive said in the matter.