Jain Spirit 2002 10 No 12

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 54

HISTORY
CONFERENCES INSPIRED REFORMS
John Cort analyses the Jain Shvetambara Conference in 1915, demonstrating how reforms were made in the community
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Scene of instruction, Rajasthan, 1800. The most prestigious and honourable merchant-princes assumed a moral leadership of the meetings
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THEN WE LOOK AT JAINISM NOT AS AN ESSENTIALISED, timeless ideal but rather as it has been embodied and defined by Jain communities and individuals over time, we discover that the unitive, static definition of Jainism starts to dissolve. In this essay I will investigate one particular historical moment in the early twentieth century when the Shvetambara Murtipujak Jain community of western India was engaged in such a process of defining itself.
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I will focus my discussion on the reform movement upon a lay conference held in 1915 in Sujangadh, near Bikaner. The principal vehicle for reform among the laity was the Jain Shvetambara Conference, founded in 1902 and based among the then recent and wealthy Jain immigrants to Bombay. There was a similar organisation for the Sthanakvasis: the All India Shvetambara Sthanakvasi Conference also based in Bombay, founded four years later in 1906. The Digambaras were slightly earlier off the block, with the Bharatvarsiya Digambara Jain Mahasabha founded in 1893 and headquartered in Khurai in central India, and the smaller regionally focused Daksin Maharastra Jain Sabha founded in 1899. The Delhi-based Bharat Jain Mahamandal, or All India Jain Association founded in 1899 attempted to provide a non-sectarian platform.. The Jain Shvetambara Conference in 1905 established a monthly magazine in English language, the Jain Swetamber Conference Herald, and held large conferences every year or two from
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These conferences reflected the traditional leadership style of the Jain community. In particular, we can see the traditional western Indian style of merchant leadership reflected, in which the most prestigious and honourable merchant-princes (abrudar, pratisthit seths) assumed a moral leadership of the meetings, based on their being leaders of the traditional collective institutions known as mahajans. The mahajans were responsible for the regulation of behaviour like establishing and maintaining production standards in many trades, regulating relationships among trades, pressuring members to uphold business agreements, helping mitigate the effects of business failures, setting holidays, ostracising members who violated social norms (especially in terms of marriage and food-exchange), and collecting for sacred institutions such as temples and animal shelters (panjrapols). Advocating or resisting socio-religious change was obviously well within the purview of the mahajans.
The leadership of each conference, therefore, consisted of the leading seths of the host city. Donations from these seths were essential for holding the conferences, and the lists of the donors and amounts were published in the conference report, or in the Conference Herald if there was no published report. The local seths organised the committees that ran the conference. The committees at the fourth conference in Patan in 1905 were: Reception, Correspondence, Mandap (which organised the pavilions. and other physical structures), Food (Bhojan), Recording Transcript (Uttara), Accounts (Hisab) and Fund. Each of these committees was headed by a leading Patan seth. The president of the Reception Committee was the wealthiest Patan Jain seth then resident in Bombay, and the chief secretary of the committee was the head of the Nagarseth family, the traditional Jain 'mayor' of Patan.
1902 into the 1920s, then less frequently thereafter. These conferences were attended by thousands of lay Jains and went on for three or four days. Later these conferences also saw separate meetings for women and youth. In the 1920s enthusiasm for the conferences started to wane, and a consensus arose that there was no real need for such large and expensive conferences to be held annually.