Dr. Surendra Singhvi
Jain Radiance On The Western Horizon
[09] World-wide Studies in Jainism 1914-1983
Inevitably the age of Germanic leadership which started in the 18Ws was brought to weakening by World War I and then by Hitler's regime of 1933 to 1945. It has partially recovered as has also the strong accompaniment given by the French. Indian work especially by the great Oriental and Jain Institutes on the texts remained impressive though the writers and the books themselves -give hints of the problems of brilliant academic achievement being sore let and hindered_ by lack of resources and a certain creeping lassitude and carelessness among clerical and book production workers which was partially generated by the colonial experience and its aftermath. Although the Jains did a great deal to develop colleges and places of higher learning, they did not endow many chairs of Jainology in them. After Independence a quantity revolution took place in the Indian Universities. A small number of new Departments specializing in Jainology and Jain related languages have come into being and a grounding was laid for the work which is presently appearing.
This period in Jainology is also sometimes criticized for failing (with notable exceptions) to pay attention to other aspects of Jainism outside the fixation on texts and philology. In the matter of community and anthropological study of the Jain community in those days is a book acclaimed as unique though it has glaring weaknesses. This is Dr. Margaret Sinclair Stevenson's Heart of Jainism.23 Because of its publisher and the strength of its field research, style and its connection with Christianity and women it has been till recently the best known and most read text in the west. Dr. Margaret Sinclair Stevenson is writing in a missionary series. On its first page she quotes in Latin Augustine's. Confessions "Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee." She, one of the most brilliant British women of her age, is living in and giving herself to far away Gujarat. In the early 1900's even the inhabitants did not find Gujarat the happiest and most comfortable place on earth. It is charitable to try to detach, allow for and overlook, her Christian prejudices. Since a number of the people around us -in-U.S.A.. are Christian it has to be remembered that some Christians fanatically believe everyone else is wrong, others realize (like the Jains) that there is a certain relativity depending on where you are going, who you are, etc. Dr Stevenson had partially moved towards the second pole as she shows in her manifest love and admiration for Jains, especially the women. Her work will be truly consummated when an American Jain woman scholar of brilliance who has studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin and German, writes a magnum opus on Christianity, especially its spirituality and its women.
In a number of ways Vilas Adinath Sangrave's Jaina Community a Social Survey, carries on the study of the Jain community.[26] But as we shall indicate it was to be much later and in a different form that this work is carried ahead. Recently at Vishva Jaina Bharati, Ladnun, Rajastan, "a deemed University;" a whole phalanx of Jain terming and life has been pin-pointed under the title " Life-Sciences." We shall say more of this later. In the 1950's and 1960’s, one part of this sector of learning was made better known to western readers by R. Williams' Jaina Yoga.[27] It is inevitably basically a technical discussion of medieval texts but gives us a reminder of Jain ideas of physiology, psychology and holistic approach to health.
Time and space fail us to annotate many other works which in the 1950's to the 1984's were more or less readily but randomly available to a well educated reader with access to University libraries in Britain, Europe and America. Moving along rapidly and from random personal reading in those days it is possible to recall Dayanand Bhargava's Jaina Ethics, Nathmal Tatia's Studies in Jams Philosophy and Mohan Lal Mehta's Jaina Philosophy. Balwant Nevaskar's Capitalists without Capitalism, the Jains and Quakers of the West. The book is a welcome foreshadowing of the many fructifying comparative studies which we hope will appear as time goes on.[29] Similarly for lack of space we trust leave to another time comment on the mass of material on Jainism which would be available to readers of standard western academic periodicals regularly browsed through by historians, "Orient lists", scholars of Comparative Religion and men and women of letters generally.
The heroic age of the Orient lists, Ideologists and Indo-Germanic philologists reached its heights and fulfillment in the work of a Jawaharlal Nehru of Jainology who was master of what the west had "discovered" as well as a natural heir to the "native" tradition. Dr Padmabhav S. Jaini's The Jaina Path of Purification has rightly been hailed as one of the best studies in the religions of South Asia in this century and certainly the best on Jainism.30 More recently, he has published a tightly and meticulously argued analysis of ancient Jain discussions about whether only the totally unclothed can reach the goal, whereas most agree it is indecorous for a woman to appear before mixed groups unclothed. Even long ago and even among male ascetics who are well known throughout world history for their suspicion of womanhood, the Jain community has had strong groups of those who insisted on women's absolute and universal rights.[31]
Two of the greatest revolutions in the history of human thought in the recent past in the west have been con cerned with the status of women and with the place of human spirituality in the universe. In 1985 there appeared a volume of over 600 pages entity La voie Jaina, histoire, spirituality, vie des ascetes pelerines de l'Inde by N. Shanta with a Presentation by Professor Raimundo Panikkar.32 It is based on long and careful study of the texts but above all on the best field-work since Dr. (Mrs.) Sinclair Stevenson's. Moreover, it is a field-work of total immersion. Although internal evidence would lead us to suppose the writer is a French Catholic woman renunciant and everlasting pilgrim hilt her Christianity shines through chiefly in her constant admiration and love for the spirituality of another group which has seniority and much to teach. As a woman her knowledge and understanding of the supreme sisterhood of her Jain friends is also ever apparent. It is an outstanding book which in its own way will never be surpassed. It was published by a distinguished but small Paris firm and received little publicity and great difficulty is being experienced in publishing an English translation.