Jinamanjari 2001 04 No 23

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

Page 74

Jinamañjari, Volume 23, No.1, April 2001
BOOK REVIEW
The Universe as Audience: Metaphor and Community among the Jains of North India. By Ravindra K. Jain. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1999. pp. 122. ISBN: 81-85952-64-7
The title of this interesting anthropological study of North Indian Digambara Jains alludes to the metaphor of the samavasarana, the legendary assembly surrounding the Jain Tirthankaras, which informed the volume The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society (Cambridge University Press, 1991) edited by Michael Carrithers and Caroline Humphrey. In their position paper 'Jains as a community, Carrithers and Humphrey had recognised that "India is not just a society of castes or of classes, but also a society of communities". Without mentioning the problems of communalism in India at all, maybe politically naive, they argued that the Jains should be studied as a (imagined) community (which they define in quasi-ethnic terms) that is "not part of, the Hindu mainstream" (12). In his new book, R. K. Jain takes issue with certain aspects of the Weberian sociology which inspires this analysis and contends that Carrithers and Humphrey depicted the samavasaraña merely "from the outside" (7), whereas his objective is to use "the same metaphor of samavasarana internally" and to build the analysis "from bottom up, rather than in terms of external factors of communalism, regionalism and nationalism" (82). Being a Digambara Jain himself, the author intends to dispell the stereotype that Jains "constitute a homogenous and uniformly affluent group" (9) by analysing the "alignment between social stratification and religious following among the
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