Maes on Luithle-Hardenberg and Cort and Orr, 'Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950'


Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg, John E. Cort, Leslie C. Orr, eds. Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950. Studies in Asian Art and Culture Series. Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2020. Illustrations. 615 pp. EUR 69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-86893-316-1

Reviewed by Claire Maes (University of Tubingen)
Published on H-Asia (August, 2022)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56109

Jainism

Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation is a 615-page edited volume addressing, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the European encounter of Jains and Jainism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India as well as the rise of Jain studies in academia. The volume is the result of a workshop that was held in February 2010 at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Tübingen.

The collection has twelve main essays, divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the way Jains and Jainism are portrayed in the early accounts of colonial officers, Orientalists, and missionaries. It opens with a chapter by Leslie C. Orr who looks at the Madras School of Orientalism. Showing how the scholars of this school were strongly indebted to earlier missionary accounts in their understanding of Jainism, Orr proceeds to reconstruct the eighteenth-century missionary activities in the Tamil region, paying special attention to the circulation, appropriation, and interpretation of missionary accounts in Europe. The second chapter, by Andrea Luithe-Hardenberg, gives a perceptive account of the career and work of Alexander Walker of Bowland (1764-1831), a Scottish officer of the East India Company, who, as Luithe-Hardenberg discovers, “was among the very first colonial officials to recognize the Jains as a discrete religious community” (p. 69). The chapter brings to light his “Account of the Jeyn, or Shravaca Religion,” a hitherto unpublished manuscript, which was the seed of inspiration to both the workshop and the volume. In the third chapter, Lawrence A. Babb analyzes the two major works of James Tod (1782-1835). He shows how this British official had understood that the successful ruling of Rajputs in old Rajasthan was highly dependent on the Jain merchant community. Babb comments that Tod’s lucid observation “eluded subsequent generations of Western scholarship on India” (p. 170). In chapter 4, Mitch Numark unpacks the intellectual proselytizing method of Bombay-based Scottish missionary scholars. He also discusses how the missionaries thought of Jainism as a religion that is both similar to and distinct from other Indian religions. Chapter 5, by John E. Cort, shows in convincing detail how Jains (as well as Hindus and Muslims) “were not silent recipients of the attacks upon their religious tradition” (p. 231). Cort analyzes two tracts of Ācārya Buddhisāgarsūri (1874-1925), who defended Jainism against the charges of Christianity. Cort shows how the Tapā Gaccha monk transposed many of the classic Jain critiques of Hinduism and Islam to the new context of disputes with Christians, while also developing new arguments. In chapter 6, Nalini Balbir recovers the voice of the “native” scholars, agents, śāstrīs, informants, and owners of manuscripts who played crucial roles in enabling Europeans to collect manuscripts and who actively participated in the production of Indological knowledge but have remained, in the words of Balbir, “shadowy figures” (p. 272). Examining as a case study the Gujarati Jain Bhagvandas Kevaldas’s interactions with Europeans, Balbir shows the various patterns of colonial relationships.

The second section of the volume is titled “Jain Businessmen: Shaping Economic Success and Jain Identity.” The first chapter of this section, chapter 7, by Gira Shroff Gratier, traces the history of the family of Sheth Amarchand Laxmichand and his descendants, who includes the author herself. Shroff, the author’s surname, is an anglicized form of śarāf, which was the title for the traditional indigenous bankers of India, many of whom were Jains. The chapter shows how the networks and operations of śarāfs “formed the backbone of the financial and commercial sectors of India before the advent of modern banking” (p. 359). Their networks not only were indispensable for the long-distance transfer of Mughal revenues but were also crucial for the British during the Anglo-Maratha Wars. The author traces the various migrations of her family from the mid-seventeenth century onward and shows how they took place “at critical moments of economic and political change” (p. 389). The next chapter, chapter 8, is also a family history. Sushil Premchand discusses the life of his great-grandfather Premchand Roychand. As the editors remark, the chapter shows well the importance of biographies to better understand the Jain community during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In chapter 9, Hawon Ku offers a rich analysis of a series of legal cases, stretching from 1820 to 1926, concerning the ownership of the Śvetāmbara pilgrimage shrines at Śatruñjaya. “This series of legal cases,” she argues, “led to a re-construction of Śatruñjaya, as well as a construction of Jain identity for the modern age” (p. 422).

The third section deals with later European, American, and Tamil scholarship on the Jains. Chapter 10, by Anna Aurelia Esposito, discusses the life and work of several pioneers of Jain studies in Germany, from Georg Bühler, known as “one of the most energetic collectors of Indian manuscripts,” and Friedrich Albrecht Weber, to Herman Jacobi, Helmuth von Glasenapp, and Ernst Leumann (p. 447). The chapter also discusses the history of Jain studies in Italy. In chapter 11, Cort covers the first “American School” of Jain studies, which started with Maurice Bloomfield, and shows how “the American tradition of Jain studies emerged from the German one” (p. 480). In the final, twelfth, chapter, Christoph Emmrich investigates the place of Jainism in the twentieth-century Tamil historical imaginary. Specifically, he compares “Jaina literature in Tamil,” a work of a Jain scholar dating from 1936 and 1941, with other histories of Tamil literature. Emmrich shows that “the various periodisation schemes of those other histories worked to marginalise Jain contributions to Tamil literature, and even more completely to exclude Tamil Jains from the historical ‘now’” (p. 445).

In addition to these chapters, the volume has a general introduction, a chapter titled “Portraits and Power,” which I discuss below, a detailed introductory chapter preceding each of the three sections, a glossary with Indic technical terms, a list of plates, a reproduction in color of some of the illustrations used in the book, a note on the contributors, and an index. In “Portraits and Power,” the three editors discuss the illustrations used in the collection, comprising portraits of “missionaries, British administrators and military officers, scholars, Jain renouncers, and Jain merchants,” as well as maṇḍalas (Jain representations of the universe), pilgrimage paṭas (maps painted on cloth), and European depictions of Indian landscapes and architectures (p. 43). The chapter gives visual insights into the accommodation strategies (or lack thereof) of certain missionaries and shows how India, and in particular Jains and Jainism, was “othered” through the European gaze. It makes clear how the portraits of missionaries, colonials, and Orientalists reflect and, in part, also reinforce the power imbalances between Indians and Europeans. In this context, the agency of Jains is also discussed. The editors show, for example, how Jains actively used the new media and styles introduced by Europeans, while also “visually contesting a Western gaze that might seek to other them” (p. 61). While the chapter reinforces some of the main arguments of the volume, at times it lacks the depth of the other chapters. It goes too quickly over important concepts: what, for instance, is precisely meant with “othering Orientalism” or “resistance to a Western gaze” (p. 54)? Some statements are not entirely convincing. How do we know, for instance, that the “abstracted space” Western scholars are often portrayed in “is indicative,” as the chapter claims, “of the universality of their scholarly pursuits in an era when scientific, context-free knowledge has attained a position of global hegemony” (p. 50)? Further, noting that the American scholar Helen M. Johnson is, unlike male scholars, portrayed with a pet dog, the chapter asserts that “if the official portraits of male scholars portray them in positions of intellectual power, the photograph of Helen Johnson communicates a subtle rejection of that power, and a preference for the society of dogs and cats who are loyal and loving in contrast to the world of male academia that had marginalised her” (p. 52). It is not clear why Johnson’s posing with her pet dog should be read as her rejection of male scholarly norms and why her portrait could instead not be interpreted as reflecting different gendered portrait customs current during the early twentieth century. It may be more just to ask how her photo fits within the rising trend of aristocrat and other women posing with their pet dogs during her time.

While each chapter offers an in-depth historical case study and can be enjoyed on its own, Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation is greater than the sum of its parts. Together, the chapters show the richness and complexity of the nature of the early British-Jain encounter. Jains are not reduced to a monolithic, essential other but portrayed and studied in their various interactions with the British (but also other Europeans and Americans) as merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, revenue farmers, judges, educated laymen, mendicants, converts, scholars, manuscript collectors, and so on. The British, too, are examined in their various roles as “administrators, generals and governors for the British East India Company and then the British Crown ... [and] as missionaries and scholars” (p. 26). The picture becomes even more complex, as the different chapters show, when we acknowledge that Jains and Europeans often embodied various roles at once. The result is a nuanced and multi-layered depiction of the relationship between Jains and Europeans between 1800 and 1950 marked by “competition and cooperation, for values and success in economic, political, intellectual, and religious spheres” (p. 27). Together, the various studies also succeed in pushing forward the important but understudied and underacknowledged fact that Jains, like other Indians, were not voiceless and powerless during the colonial rule but had agency, actively negotiating the terms of the relationships, and co-constructing as well as contesting European understandings and reifications of “Jainism.” The chapters further significantly enhance the history of Jain studies, showing the various competing understandings current during the early twentieth century of the origins of and relationship between Jainism, Buddhism, and Brahmanism/Hinduism. The chapters also offer corrections of this history, showing, for instance, that Bombay-based Protestant missionaries had “conceptualized Jains and the Jain religion as a distinct religious community and religion long before [Herman] Jacobi” (p. 217). The different chapters together also challenge the postcolonial claim that “religions” and the notion of “religious communities” are modern European inventions. Jains, as one chapter convincingly shows, “did not have to wait for European Orientalist scholars and Christian missionaries to ‘invent’ ex nihilo ‘the Jain religion’. Such an abstract objectified phenomenon as it became known in the nineteenth century had existed or resonated in some way and in some form long before it was ‘discovered’ by Europeans” (pp. 221-22).

The volume also abounds in smaller but interesting historical (fun) facts. Over the course of the pages, one learns, for instance, that Bombay-based Scottish missionaries employed the English term “Jainism” well before it became attested in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1858. Or also, one learns about how self-help books rose to popularity in the nineteenth century and indigenous bankers may have relied on Ādivāsīs (tribespeople) for quick information delivery. One can also read about the story of the Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577-1656), who, being denounced by another Jesuit for adopting the dress and customs of an ascetic Brahmin, wrote a report to Rome in which he defended his position by collecting 108 signatures of Brahmins in support of his statement that “the wearing of the sacred thread, of sandal, musk, and tilaka were not religious practices” (p. 95).

The editorial work is of high quality, but a few remarks must be made. The term “cooperation,” one of the key concepts of the book, is not spelled consistently. While the word mostly appears unhyphenated, it also is spelled with a hyphen in the title of the general introduction and on page 160. On page 51, “Plate 11.3” does not refer to W. Norman Brown, as indicated, but to an illustration of a letter Dr. Helen M. Johnson received from the Mandal Jaina Sangha. On page 54, the reference to the illustration of Buddhisāgarsūri is missing, which is “Plate 5.3” on page 242. To increase the accessibility of the scholarship to readers outside the discipline of Jain studies or Indology, it would have been advisable to either translate or briefly explain Indic terms when they occur for the first time in the volume, such as sthāpanācārya, muhpattī, and paṭa. It bears to note that some chapters are unnecessarily long. The average is thirty-seven pages, with the shortest chapter consisting of eighteen pages and the longest consisting of sixty-six pages. The readability of some chapters could have easily been increased through a more concise rendering of the information and a better structure. These are only minor criticisms, however, which do not diminish the fact that this volume is a rich collection of exemplary scholarship where arguments are carefully built up, historical contexts painstakingly reconstructed, and sources and methodologies transparently explained.

Cooperation, Contribution, and Contestation is a must read for the enthusiast of the history of Jains and Jainism during the British colonial period, as well as the history of Jain studies. Given its multidisciplinary approach, this book will speak to students and scholars belonging to a wide range of disciplines, from social history and comparative religion, to Indology, economics, and cultural anthropology.

Citation: Claire Maes. Review of Luithle-Hardenberg, Andrea; Cort, John E.; Orr, Leslie C., eds., Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. August, 2022.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56109

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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