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Progress in Jain Academia
By Dr. Peter Flügel
THE ANNUAL JAIN LECTURE OF THE CENTRE OF JAINA STUDIES AT THE SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
and the CNRS in Paris. Despite the brilliance of thei pioneering research, these efforts had no lastin structural effects on the field as a whole, which remains fragmented and discontinuous due to the lacl of an institutional base.
AL
esearch in Jainism has a long tradition at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of
London. It is associated with SOAS eminent Indologists such as Sir
Ralph Turner, John Brough, University of London
Arthur Llewellyn Basham, Duncan Derrett, Padmanabh S. Jaini, Robert Williams, John Gray and J. Clifford Wright, who during their spells at SOAS published extensively in the field of Jaina Studies. Yet, until recently, Jainism was never taught at SOAS nor anywhere else outside India. Interested students had to turn to general courses on Indic religions or advanced classes in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi or Gujarati to gain a glimpse of the rich Jain cultural heritage. This unsatisfactory situation began to be redressed in 1999 when Jaina Studies was launched as an independent field of inquiry in the newly formed Department of the Study of Religions. The initiative was inspired by the late Dr Julia Leslie (1 948-2004) and rendered viable through seed funding from the Jain Academy for the teaching of two courses on Jainism. For some time, Julia Leslie had invited visiting samanis and samans (neophyte Terapanth Jain nuns and monks) to give guest lectures to her classes on Hinduism (sic) and nurtured relationships with the growing Jain communities in London.
From 1999 onwards, SOAS took the lead in the fiel through infrastructural innovations that culminated in the establishment of the Centre of Jaina Studies (Cojs in 2004. This centre offers, for the first time, thu prospect of a stable anchor and forum for the globa network of Jain scholars collaboratively to develop Jaina Studies as an independent interdisciplinary field a inquiry. The initiatives were financed almost entirel through successful bids for competitive research grants, notably a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) on Jaina law ang the Jaina community in India and Britain. This reflect not only the quality of the applications but also the growing academic and public interest in Jainism, which is one of the least studied of the ancient Indian religions.
Academics and the Jain community at the 9th Jaina Studies
Workshop at SOAS in 2007. Many are YJ members.
At the time, Jaina Studies were still in the early stages of their transformation from a purely philological and archaeological endeavour to the multidisciplinary exploration of a lived religious tradition, which it is now. The changes were triggered by a series of field studies in the 1980s and 1990s, which contributed not only to Indology and comparative religion, but also to anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, and to cross-disciplinary fields such as gender studies and diaspora studies. The new focus on contemporary Jainism also injected a breath of fresh air into a then stagnant and inaccessible academic sub-discipline, Jainology and Prakrit studies, and attracted a new generation of students to the then largely unexplored but now rapidly developing multidisciplinary field of Jaina studies.
Highly specialised fields in the arts and humanities such as Jaina Studies can survive in the current economic climate only if previously isolated researchers create regional and global networks to strengthen their voice and to bid collaboratively for research funds. Al present, SOAS is the best placed institution, maybe the only one outside India, which can turn this strategic necessity into reality without further infrastructura investments.
Scholars at the University of Cambridge played a central role in these new developments, together with their counterparts at the Divinity School at Harvard,
This fact is widely recognised both in academic circles and within the global Jain community. Within a short period of time SOAS became one of the most important venues for Jaina studies in the world. already functions as a central node for multiple collaborations with scholars in Britain and North America and within the European Network of Jain:
Jain Education International
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