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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
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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

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References

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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

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