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Social Divisions in the Jaina Community
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subdivisions like Visā, Dasā, Pāñcha and Adhichā; and these are treated in a descending order of social respectability. Among the six castes of Terāpanthis, the Charanā gare caste is considered respectable as many religious and learned men happened to be from this caste.49 Similarly in the former Nizam's Dominions Śrāvagis are regarded as superior in rank to the Poravadas because of the great regard the former entertain for animal life.50 In a small Lamechú caste there are two divisions, viz. Uñcha and Nichā which suggest that a sense of high and low is present in them.51 There are three divisions of the Jainas in the North Kanara District, viz., the Chaturthas, the Țagara-Bogāras, and the Priests. But the Chaturthas and Panchamas hold along from the Țagara-Bogāras, whom they look upon as inferiors though they do not differ from them in religion.52 It should be remembered that all these are trivial and individual differences mainly found within caste or between a few castes and there is nothing like even a faint plea of arrangement of castes as a whole according to social precedence in the Jaina community.
Among the Hindu castes there are minute rules as to what sort of food or drink can be accepted by a person and from what castes. For this purpose all food is divided into two classes., * Kachchā' and 'Pakkā', the former being any food in the cooking of which water has been used, and the latter all food cooked in clarified butter without the addition of water. In general a man of higher caste cannot accept ‘Kachcha' food from one of the lower, though the latter may regale himself with similar food offered .by a member of one of the castes accepted to be higher than his own.53 These restrictions, strictly speaking, have no place in the Jaina community for the simple reason that in it there is no hierarchical organisation of castes and as such there is no ban on dining with any other member of the Jaina community irrespective of his caste. Recently Svāmī Atmānanda declared that as Jainism considers all its followers as equals there should be no objection in taking food from any Jaina and in fact this was practiced in the past.54 From the inscription at Sravana-Belago!a in Mysore it appears that even though there were several castes, only a slight difference existed in reality between them in the 14th century of our era.55 But later on, the Jainas, possibly due to the influence of the Hindus with whom they were closely in touch, introduced
