________________
PREFACE
Ever since I was exposed to Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis during my M. A. (Sociology) studies programme, I had more or less decided to test the thesis by myself writing a dissertation on Jainism and the Jains. Reading Weber's insightful analysis of Jainism contained in Religion of India further strengthened my resolve to do that. An award of Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship for Ph.D. programme in the late 1970s that landed me at the Carleton University of Ottawa kept my resolve intact, where I wrote a term paper on the Jains for a course on Sociology of Religion. Unfortunately it could not go further for a number of reasons. Instead my academic interest got shifted to Indian Diasporic Studies - an academic subject that eventually earned me a Ph.D. degree. Nevertheless, an updated and thoroughly revised version of that term paper constitutes Chapter 5 of the book.
The book begins with an introduction of Jainism with its brief history in different parts of India and the sects and sub-sects that developed within it during the past two thousand years. Some basic social structural features such as family, kinship and marriage are also mentioned alongwith a brief note on food, festivals and places of pilgrimage of Jains. Chapter 2 highlights the salient features of Jain philosophy in terms of its metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and ethics which have been the basis of the Jain way of life for centuries. At the end, the Jain way of life and its practicality in diasporic context as well as India is critically examined.
During the mid-1990s, the Census of India 1991 data revealed a relatively slow population growth rate of the Jains vis-à-vis other five major religious communities of India, namely Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Buddhists. The findings were reported widely in the media that rekindled my interest to probe the problem further. Subsequently I wrote a brief article entitled "The Jains in the 1991 Census of India" that I sent for publication to a prominent Jain journal in India. The editor of the journal expressed his inability to publish the same saying "the committee does not want to publish it". I still fail to understand why, given the fact that an article based on the 1981 census data was earlier published by the same journal. My best guess is that perhaps the journal did not want to highlight the suddenly emerged situation of low fertility behaviour among the Jains in the 1991 census data. Meanwhile, the 2001 Census data on religious communities in India were also available, which prompted me to revise the article in the light of the new data. Chapter 3 in the present volume is an outcome of that exercise.
IX
