________________
Peter Flügel, Jain Monastic Life
385
enjoy. Women of "poor" middle class families in rural areas live in joint families. They have less time for themselves and are totally dependent on their husbands and their families. They have no independent income, cannot leave the house often, and, because the villages offer not much, enjoy few public entertainments. But they have more contact with mendicants than metropolitan families. The only entertainment and intellectual stimulation is often provided by religious contexts. Similar reasons have already been reported by Goonasekera (1986) for Terāpanth monks. Family Name: The mendicants were recruited from a small number of gotras, or exogamous family clans. Of altogether 114 family names mentioned by respondents, 17 names accounted for 33% of all mendicants. Family Size: Nuclear families (within the joint family) had a median size of 6 members (range of 1-14). This family size is not untypical for middle class Rajasthani households, though firm data are a desideratum. It decreased slightly over the last 70 years. Most of the key families had more than one mendicant in the order (one nun could name 13 relatives inside the order). Birth Order: Previous studies on Buddhist (Spiro 1970) and Terāpanth Jain mendicants (Goonasekera 1986: 122) argued that the motivation for renunciation can be explained in terms of the emotional deprivation of middle children, i.e. Freud's theory that "middle children experience fluctuations of nurturing and affection from early childhood ... especially girls". In contrast to Goonasekera's finding of a higher than statistically expected proportion of middle children amongst his sample of 75 Terāpanth "renouncers" (82%) - 65 females (86.6%) and 10 males (13.3%) - the present sample of 137 respondents - 56 sādhus (40.9%), 40 sādhvīs (29.9%), 41 samanīs (29.2%) - revealed only the expected percentage of 61% middle children (given an average family size of 6), as well as 26% youngest (Goonasekera: 10%), 11% eldest, and 2% only children. The overrepresentation of middle children in the earlier study may thus be a sampling effect. But both samples are not statistically representative. It is significant, though, that 10% more female than male middle children renounced. The high number of youngest male children reflects the economic and social importance of the eldest male child as the principal heir of the family business. Initiation Age: The data confirm the overall increase of the mean initiation age over time observed by Goonasekera, and substantiate trends, such as the impact of the aforementioned institutional factors on initiation patterns. The mean initiation age for the entire sample was 20 years. Generally, males (mean age: 18) were initiated earlier than females, nuns (20) earlier than female novices (samanīs) (24).However, during the period between 1931 and 1948 the mean initiation age of 15 years was identical for male and female mendicants. Gender differences developed with the creation of the first pre-monastic educational institution for girls in the town of Ladnun in 1949, and in particular after the reforms of Ācārya Tulsī (1914-1997) in the 1980s which only
