Shifting Communities in Early Jain Prabandha Literature: Sectarian Attitudes and Emergent Identities

Abstract

Taking up the still debated question whether Muslims and particularly Hindus were or were not aware of forming a common religious community before the nineteenth century, David N. Lorenzen stated in the introduction to his essay Who Invented Hinduism? published in 2009 that the term Hinduism designed religious identity as early as the fifteenth century in Hindu texts and even one century earlier in inscriptions. However, most scholars did not take into account the Jain texts, probably because it was more or less unconsciously admitted that Jains are in fact Hindus. Nevertheless, the testimony of Jain Prabandhas, a new genre which includes biographies, eulogies and chronicles, reveals to be of peculiar interest. Indeed, on one hand, the Prabandhas attest that the Jains saw themselves as different to the Hindu sects and that they competed for instance with devotees of Śiva in order to obtain the favour of a sovereign or to control a sacred place. On the other hand, the Jain authors do not go so far as to assimilate Muslims and Hindus into a single composite ‘other’. Rather they identify a double ‘other’ represented by the non-Jains in the Indian world and by the Muslim newcomers. The terms in use are analyzed through various examples. Besides, as opposed to this double ‘other’, the Jains seem to have developed a sense of a larger community. As a matter of fact, if they go on using terms which apply to members of one and the same sectarian group, they also overcome sectarian divisions. Furthermore, by borrowing from Persian sources the term hinduka, they reveal that the advent of a foreign elite entailed the emergence of new identities.