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about 28% of the private property in India. About 62% of the charity donations come from the Jains. And finally, the Jains also constitute an affluent diaspora. It must be pointed out here that these statements that keep appearing in a section of the Jain ethnic and diasporic press from time to time are not based on reliable data, and therefore the readers are warned to take them only provisionally. The relative affluence of the Jains in India still remains to be scientifically quantified.
Two contradictory explanations can be offered in regard to the relative affluence among the Jains. One is the Weberian in terms of the Protestant ethic thesis. Weber maintains that there is "a positive relationship between Jainism and economic motivation". Weber seems to suggest that although Jainism is spiritualised in the direction of "World renunciation", some features of inner worldly asceticism are also present in it. These are reflected in such virtues as thriftiness, self-discipline, frugality, abstention, economy of time etc, which eventually promote savings and accumulation of wealth. The other is the Marxist explanation in which the historically-evolved predominantly petty bourgeois class position of the Jains vis-a-vis the dependent, impoverished mass of the Indian peasantry and its exploitation by the former can account for the prosperity of the Jains. Unfortunately hardly any work has been done along these lines although both the perspectives offer a number of hypotheses for systematic studies (Hardiman 1996; Weber 1958).
Minority Status
As already noted, Jains have been a minority community since at least the beginning of the modern times. Presently the Jains as an affluent minority face two major problems. One of these relate to seeking and maintaining its separate ethnic/religious identity vis-avis the Hindus. The 2001 census figures pertaining to the Jains suggest that ethnic revivalism has been taking place among the Jains. Thus compared to the 1991 census figures where the Jains registered only 4% decadal growth rate, in the 2001 census their growth rate was about 26%. The Indian census authorities as well as demographers believe that this dramatic change in the growth rate is not due to change in fertility behaviour among the Jains, but rather
122 Jains in India and Abroad
