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Chapter 5
TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE JAIN COMMUNITY
There is considerable amount of literature on the Jain philosophy and religion. The social anthropological and sociological studies of the Jain community, however, continue to remain scarce. This chapter attempts to identify and suggest some of the major areas of the Jain community that require social sciences studies. Before we do so, a cursory look at the anthropological/sociological historiography on the subject would be useful.
Sociological studies of Jainism begins with the German sociologist Max Weber's book Religion of India (1958) which contained a halfchapter on Jainism titled "Heterodox Soteriology of the Cultured Professional Monks”. This small piece provides significant sociological insight into the structure and functioning of the Jain community and religion. However, his work remained virtually unknown to the world until its translation into English in 1920s. Meanwhile, in the late 1950s an Indian sociologist V.A. Sangave (1980) had published a major work on the Jains which was mainly based on scriptural material and a preliminary social survey. Surprisingly, Weber does not figure in this work.
After Sangave's work, no major sociological/anthropological work on the Jains was done for over a decade until 1971 when Balwant Nevaskar published his book on a comparative study of the Jains and the Quakers using some of the propositions of the Weberian Protestant Ethic thesis. Again after a gap of about twenty years or so a group of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge and other western universities began to publish research papers and books based on their fieldwork in India, particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan (Babb 1998; Banks 1992; Carrithers 1989; Carrithers and Humphrey 1991; Chapple 2002; Cort 1991; Dundas 1992; Folkert 1993; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Laidlaw 1995; Vallely 2003). A cursory look at this
rature published since the late 1980s suggest that much of it is concerned with the Jain religious themes such as renunciation, worship, rituals and role of the mendicants in the community. These developments have inspired some Indian scholars (Jain, R.K. 1999;
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