Description

Even though Jainism appeared in India at the same time as Buddhism, as a reaction to Brahmanism, it had a very different destiny: whereas Buddhism almost disappeared there in the 13th century, Jainism succeeded in coexisting with Hinduism and other religions throughout the centuries. At the moment of the founding of the Indian democratic state, the members of this community were so much part of the Indian society that their status is ambiguous in the constitution: on the one hand, in article 25, the Jains are considered as Hindus; on the other hand, however, the Jains are treated as distinct for certain legal purposes. The current situation continues to reflect this double identity: in the big movement for reservation policy, the Jains ask to be given the status of a national minority on the ground that they form an independent community.

When studying the specificity of Jainism as well as the process of its acculturation to a larger community, there has been an emphasis both on the peculiar religious and philosophical aspects of Jainism and on its adaptation to the Hindu religion and society. However, the role of Jain literature in this process of adaptation and self-definition is still to be explored. In particular, it has been largely ignored that the Jains have used the language of their own, i.e., Prakrit, to compose works in the style of the famous Kadambari. Thus, this paper intends to give an insight into the characteristics of Jain belles-lettres and their contribution to Indian literature.

If Jain authors were acquainted with of their own canonical, exegetical and literary tradition, they were also no doubt well-versed in the worldly treatises of love, politics and poetry, as well as in the works of Classical Indian literature. The question was for them rather how to take a position in the genre of belles-lettres in order to deftly represent their community, as is fortunately shown by the prologues of their works. Once they had decided to write such a work, on one hand, Jain authors derived their inspiration from Brahmanical writers by assimilating the themes and the style of their chefs-d’oeuvre; on the other hand, they knew how to differentiate themselves by subordinating them to their specific tradition. Furthermore, they showed that Prakrit could perfectly serve literary purposes even better than Sanskrit and, lastly, they even developed new genres, like the campu, a novel mixing prose and verse, which was to be adopted throughout the medieval period. Thus, while being part and parcel of a larger Indian tradition and creating their original works, Jain writers gave a new impetus to Indian literature and contributed to the richness of the Indian culture.

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Christine Chojnacki is currently Professor of Indian Languages and Cultures at the University of Lyon, France. Her last publication is a translation and study of Uddyotana’s Kuvalayamala, a novel in prose and verse dating from 779, in the collection Indica et Tibetica printed in Marburg, Germany. She is now finishing a book on the Hindu and Jain traditions of Krishna in collaboration with André Couture, University of Laval, Canada. In progress is the study of Jain works during the muslim period to explain the formation of contemporary situations and identities.