Jain Spirit 2005 06 No22

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

Page 72

HISTORY
appointed Curator of Indian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (then the Pennsylvania Museum of Art). He held this post until 1954, and the collection of Indian art at the Philadelphia Museum remains today one of the premier collections in the United States. He was also Curator of the Indian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum from 1936 to 1947. Between 1929 and 1938 he published half a dozen studies on Jain painting in scholarly journals in India and the United States. In 1949 he published a study of the carved wooden Jain temple pavilion from Patan in North Gujarat, that is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; this pavilion is a centrepiece of the reinstalled Indian galleries at the Met. In writing about Brown's contributions as an art historian, Moti Chandra, for many years Director of the Prince of Wales Museum (now called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) in Bombay, said, "His contribution to the history of PreMughal painting is so substantial and important that it makes him a pioneer in this important... branch of Indian art. ... By his deep study of Western Indian miniature painting, Professor Norman Brown was able to analyse the stylistic variations in Western Indian painting. ... [His] collection of the basic material for the history of Western Indian painting has enabled many scholars, including myself, to take advantage of his basic work and enlarge the scope of his researches further. ... Most of us who are working in the field of Pre-Mughal painting owe a debt of gratitude to him. There is no doubt that Professor Norman Brown has obtained an exalted place among the art historians of India."
Brown's writing was not limited to scholarly publications. In the March 1934 issue of Asia Brown published a short article on Jainism, entitled The Gentle Jains. This was a popular magazine published by the American Asiatic Association, an organisation that existed between 1898 and 1937, and which engaged in promoting American economic relations with Asia. In this article, one of the first to bring the Jains to the attention of a larger American audience, he outlined the Jain ethos of ahimsa. He wrote that loving kindness is found in every religion, "but it is in the application that Jainism goes beyond the others." Whereas Christians extend loving kindness to fellow human beings, and Hindus and Buddhists extend it to all animals, only the Jains apply this ethical principle to every sensate being. Jain Enation International
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Brown illustrated the article with his photographs of Shravana Belgola, Mount Girnar, and Mount Abu. On the bus to Shravana Belgola he was befriended by an elderly Digambara Jain man, with whom Brown conversed in Sanskrit. When Brown discovered that the food he had brought with him had fallen out of the bus due to the bumpy road, the man arranged for food to be sent to him. Brown recorded how fortunate he was that his own necessity brought him into contact with this paragon of benevolence.
Since Brown's travels among the Jains were motivated by his textual studies, he visited the Jain manuscript libraries of Cambay and Patan. Here again Brown related the personal kindness and assistance shown to him, in this case by the Shvetambara Muni Punyavijay in Patan. Brown wrote that this simple monk, one of the intellectual giants of twentieth-century Jainism, "spent two full days in gathering the manuscripts I wanted, trudging miles through the dusty streets barefoot, since his vows forbid any use of a conveyance." After the 1930s most of Brown's scholarly attention turned elsewhere. He wrote three text-and-art studies of Hindu texts, the Saundaryalahari (1958), Vasantavilasa (1962) and Mahimnastava (1965). He wrote two broader overviews of Indian culture and history for which he was so uniquely prepared: The United States and India and Pakistan, first published in 1953 and then in revised and enlarged editions in 1963 and 1972; and Man in the Universe, published in 1966. This latter book in my opinion remains one of the best short introductions to the continuities of classical Indian thought ever written. Throughout his career Brown published popular articles on India in addition to his scholarly studies. As Rosane Rocher wrote, "More than any Sanskrit scholar before, Brown cared deeply about modern India. He followed closely the political and social developments on the subcontinent, sympathised with its struggle for independence and with India's cause later on." He wrote articles for the general press on Gandhi, the Indian independence movement, Indian democracy, the Sikhs, Indo-Pakistani relations and religion in Indian society. He devoted much time to scholarly institution building both at the University of Pennsylvania and with the American Institute of Indian Studies. Throughout his career he also maintained an active scholarly focus on Vedic materials and it is in this area that his scholarship is For Personal & Private Use Only
perhaps best remembered today.
Brown retired from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 at the age of 74. During his lifetime he was widely honoured for his scholarly and social contributions in India and the United States. He received honorary degrees from the Universities of Jadavpur and Madras, in addition to the University of Michigan and his own University of Pennsylvania.
Norman Brown's scholarship on Jainism remains a model for us today. In his books and articles he showed that a single intellectual discipline is insufficient for appreciating the full richness of Jain culture. To understand even a single manuscript, one needs to bring to bear the tools of art history, religious studies and literary analysis. Because the Jains have written and spoken so many languages, one needs to have at least basic competence in both the classical languages of Sanskrit and Prakrit, and one or more of the contemporary vernaculars such as Hindi and Gujarati. Because the Jain tradition has developed in manifold ways throughout its long history, any study of the Jains must be attentive to both historical data and the contemporary community. Finally, the study of the Jains cannot be conducted in isolation. The Jains themselves have always lived in complex social settings, and so the study of Jainism requires the study of the rest of South Asian culture and religion as well.
Norman Brown did not establish a lineage of Jain Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. But he did provide for all subsequent scholars of Jainism an intellectual model of how to study the Jains, which is unrivalled in its combination of intellectual sophistication and human kindness.⚫
John E. Cort is Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and a member of the Advisory Board of Jain Spirit. Much of the material for this essay comes from two biographies of Brown by his colleague Rosane Rocher, in the 'Journal of the American Oriental Society' (1976), and in 'India and Indology: Selected Articles by W. Norman Brown', edited by Rosane Rocher (Delhi, 1972).