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viii
JAINISM
society, the Jains did not change their faith and customs, to any great extent. Their community is preserved to the present day, while Buddhism practically ceased to exist in India in the tenth century A.D. - -
At the present time, the Jains, even though comparatively small in numbers (2.03 million according to 1961 census) play a noticeable role in the socio-political life of the country and belong in their main mass to the middle and great bourgeoise.
The writer has set before herself the task of revealing the historical and ethnographic roots of Jainism. The study aims at tracing the history of development of the Jain community, describing its internal structure and customs, and evaluating the contribution, which the Jains made to literature and art of India. Finally, it will also offer to the readers an assessment of the contemporary position of this community and of the new ideological shades in Jainism.
In the present book the history of the rise of Jainism is viewed in direct relation to those ethnographical and sociohistorical processes, which took place in ancient India, at the end of the second and the beginning of the first millennium B.C. That was the epoch of the settlement of the alien Aryan tribes on the soil of North India and also the epoch of the formation of class relations in the environments of these regions.
Marching forward from the North-west to the South and the East, the Aryans settled on the plains of the Ganges and Jamuna. Their relations with the local peoples were complex and many-sided. Individual local tribes or parts of big ethnographical masses were annihilated or exterminated from their own soil. The Aryans effected military alliances and established trade-barter relations with others. Several local tribes were gradually drawn in the economic-cultural life of the Aryans and lost their own ethnographical originality. The Aryans themselves were subjected to assimilation by the local peoples, and they adopted gradually many elements of their material and spiritual culture. In as much as the Aryans penetrated in India, at different periods, the subsequent groups of Aryan newcomers carried on battles of annihilation with the former Aryan settlers in the same way as with the local tribes.
In the concrete historical conditions of India, a country with a variegated and ethnically multiform composition of
