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MAY 2017
PRABUDDH JEEVAN
41
Since, for all of these reasons the Digambaras posit But this is not to say that the issues and attitudes the impossibility of nuns going naked, they ipso facto about women and gender raised in these texts are not deny them any hope of spiritual liberation for the intrinsically of interest and even vital to our Digambaras argue that a sense of modesty indicates understanding of the conception of women as "the the failure to suppress all sexual feelings and that the Other" in patriarchal societies in South Asia and wearing of clothing is but one form of keeping elsewhere. For in the Jainas characteristic peeling of nonessential possessions, two factors that are social and psychological constructions back to some absolutely out of keeping with the life of a true radically constructed core, we see, I think, with renunciant. Thus nudity is, for the Digambaras an unusual clarity some of the roots of misogyny in absolute requirement for a genuine mendicant. Since traditional as well as modern male-dominated cultures. women cannot undertake this practice it follows that For here, along with the usual stereotyping abuse about they cannot be true nuns and hence one cannot attain the "weaker sex”, the fickleness of women, and their spiritual liberation, immediately following a life in a alleged sexual voracity, we have a perhaps more female body.
fundamental set of attacks deriving unambiguously The Svetambaras, for whom the donning of white from powerful and deep-seated phobic anxiety about robes is both a symbol and a requirement of the the “uncanny" physiology of the female reproductive monastic life, cannot accept this position, and one is system. The Jaina conception of a woman inhabiting often-moved, in reading these debates, by the feeling a body infested with hosts of tiny beings that, through that despite the very real animus towards women her incessant desires and biological processes, she expressed by both parties to the debate and the both creates -and annihilates, a body at, once alluring amount of effort and time invested in it; it harbours a and repulsive that makes of a man both a lecher and powerful and only occasionally explicit subtext. In other mass murderer, and so leads him from the spiritual words, one feels that in their virulent attacks on the path directly to hell, is virtually unique in its minds, souls, and bodies of women, the Digambaras construction, and explicitness. My feeling is that these are also perhaps chiefly attempting to undercut the attitudes, far from being the quaint or bizarre spiritual bonafides of their Svetambara rivals, while in obsessions of a fringe religious sect, in fact lie close their somewhat grudging defense of the possibility of to the heart of the sexism that has served as a moksa for, women the Svetambara and Yapaniya rationale for the disempowerment of women in all monks are really defending their own entitlement to the spheres of life, secular and spiritual, in societies of the term "Munis". For just as the Digambaras regard their ancient East and the modern West. It is for this reason own ksullikas and aryikas only as particularly pious that I believe these jaina debates on the liberation of laywomen so they are inclined to treat Svetambara women deserve to be read not only by scholars of monks themselves as pious if pretentious laymen Eastern religion but by thoughtful people in all areas of referring to them sometimes contemptuously as scholarship including anthropology, sociology, social jainabhasas or pseudo-Jainas. Indeed given the very history, psychology, arid women's studies. Particular attitudes expressed in the Jaina literature and in the attention to these texts and what they tell us about, other Indian traditional-texts towards women it is the profoundly misogynistic attitudes that lie at the heart difficult to believe that the monkish authors on both of the major religions originating in the Near East and sides of the issue could have regarded women in and South Asia should, I think, also be given by the authors for themselves as sufficiently interesting to sustain so of contempt feminist studies of these religions and their intense a debate for so many centuries. More likely, organizational structure. this debate on the question of the possibility of
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