Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T19:04:04.905Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Concretely Imagining the Southern Digambar Jain Community, 1899–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Michael Carrithers
Michael Carrithers
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a ‘small but select’ group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, the dakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā. The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, while so many of the other associations in that lush growth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India have disappeared. It has been instrumental in forging a Jain ethnicity, in creating a new sense of a specifically Jain past and present, and in fostering new habits of education and of social intercourse among Jains. A good proportion of what is today taken for granted by Jains about southern Digambar samskrti, ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, was moulded by Jains acting in and through the Sabha.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 523 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sangave, V., dakṣiṇ mahāra jain sabhā itihās (Kolhapur. 1976), p. 30.Google Scholar

2 Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).Google Scholar It is important to note that the idea of an imagined community does in fact fit nicely with ethnicity as well as with nationalism, as was argued in Carrithers, M. and Humphrey, C., The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society (Cambridge, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 It is difficult to think of this period in India's history—or of any period, for that matter—without thinking of Windisch's remark that society is not just characterized by, but is actually constituted of, ‘conflictual’ relations, See Windisch, U., Speech and Reasoning in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1990).Google Scholar

4 Carrithers, M., ‘Passions of Nation and Community in the Bahubali Affair’, Modern Asian Studies 22, 4 (1988), pp. 815–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Carrithers, and Humphrey, , Assembly of Listeners.Google Scholar

6 A sensitive treatment of what happens when a sense of ethnicity becomes salient appears in Gupta's, D. discussion of Sikh ethnicity in the Punjab: ‘Ethnic Imagos and their Correlative Spaces’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 26, 2 (1993), pp. 195–222.Google Scholar

7 Dundas, P., The Jains (London. 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Pragati, 12 August 1919.Google Scholar

9 Ibid.

10 Conlon, F.. A Caste in a Changing World (Berkeley, 1977).Google Scholar

11 A dispassionate observer might have wondered whether, or how long, the Jains of the region would retain a distinctive Jain character at all. See Carrithers, M., ‘Jainism and Buddhism as Enduring Historical Steams’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 21, 2 (1990), pp. 141–63.Google Scholar

12 Sangave, , Itihās, p. 27.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., p. 30.

14 See the chronology attached as an appendix in ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 36

16 Latthe, A. B., Introduction to Jainism (Bombay, 1905).Google Scholar

17 Omvedt, Gail, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873–1930 (Bombay, 1976).Google Scholar

18 Ibid., p. 127.

19 Sangave, , Itihās, p. 393.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 36.

21 Carrithers, M., Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

22 Carrithers, M., ‘The foundations of Community among Southern Digambar Jains: an Essay on Rhetoric and Experience’, in Carrithers, and Humphrey, , Assembly of Listeners, pp. 261–86.Google Scholar

23 Sangave, , Itihās, p. 286.Google Scholar

24 Pragati, 1 May 1919.Google Scholar

25 Pragati, 23 November 1919.Google Scholar

26 Pragati, 5 February 1920.Google Scholar

27 See Haynes, D., Rhetoric and Ritual in a Colonial Setting: The Making of Public Culture in Surat City, Western India, 1852–1928, (Berkeley, 1991).Google Scholar

28 Pragati, 8 and 23 December 1919.Google Scholar