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The Working Model
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was asked. Out of the 154 pereons, who have answered the questionnaire, 149 are married, 3 are unmarried and two have not given any information. Of the 149 married persons, 73 are married according to the Hindu ritual while 76 are married in accordance with the Jaina ritual. It means that nearly 50% of the Jaina married persons have gone through the Hindu ritual at the time of their marriage ceremonies. It is not only that the Hindu marriage ritual is not foreign to Jainas but no discrimination is made between the Jaina and Hindu ritual. Thus it has been stated by one person that while his first marriage was performed according to the Jaina ritial, the second was performed in accordance with the Hindu ritual. But it must be remembered that the persons who have sent their replies are mostly aged persons and their marriages, it seems, were performed more than fifteen years ago. Therefore their replies reflect the conditions existing at tha. time. But recently the conditions have changed and it has been specifically mentioned that now the Jaina ritual is much more generally observed than the Hindu ritual. The main reason for abandoning the Hindu ritual and accepting, in its plaee, the Jaina ritual can be ascribed to the fact that during recent years there has been a general awakening in the Jaina community as a result of which there is a marked tendency to observe Jaina ritual wherever it is available. That is why we find some persons clearly stating that when they were married nearly thirty years ago there was nothing like Jaina ritual in the sense that the people were ignorant about the existence and practice of Jaina ritual at the time of their marriages.
Further, if we take into account the main sect of these married persons, it will be noted that the custom of performing, marriage ceremony according to the Hindu ritual appears to be preponderantly more prevalent among the “vetāmbaras than amon, the Digambaras. Thus out of the 73 persons who are married according to the Hindu ritual, as many as 62 belong to the Svetambara sect and only 11 to the Digambara sect. Similarly, the number of Digambaras and Svetāmbaras among the 76 persons who are married in accordance with the Jaina ritual, is 69 and 7 respectively. In other wrods, out of the 80 Digambaras, 11 are married according to the Hindu ritual and 69 according to the Jaina ritual; and out of the 69 Śvetāmbaras, 62 are married in accordance with the Hindu ritual while 7 are married in accordance with the Jaina
