Open Boundaries: Jai Communities and Cultures in Indian History.

• Author: Soni, J.
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Open Boundaries: Jai Communities and Cultures in Indian History. Edited by JOHN E. CORT. SUNY Series in Hindu Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. viii + 264. $24.95 (paper).

What we have here is a book on Jam studies that is the culmination of eleven years of dealing with an aspect of the subject matter, the "initial seeds" of which were planted in 1987. The growth to maturity involved a panel, a four-day workshop and a narrowing down of the conversations there for this product. The intention is simple and clear, namely to try to answer two related questions which seem rhetorical: "Who are the Jains?" and "What is Jainism?" (p. 12). Merely to say that the Jains are literally those who follow the teachings of the Jinas, the last of whom, Mahavira, was a contemporary of Buddha, does not lead us very far. Since its origins, before the time of Buddha, Jainism has come a long way in over two and a half millennia, both within itself and within the Indian context of the "others," including not only the Buddhists and Hindus, but later at least also the Muslims and Christians. In short, the answer to each question "will depend upon a complicated set of factors which are themselves depende nt upon the context within which the question is raised" (p. 12). This is not tactical, academic prevarication, but a realistic stance. With this book's eleven chapters one can read eleven answers (see some of the titles below), with the obvious corollary that there can be as many answers as those who attempt to delve into this vast and complex field. In its task the book, as the back cover states, "provides a new perspective on Jainism, one of the oldest yet least-studied of the world's religions."

It is as much a truism as a profundity to say that answers to questions in general depend on the context and standpoint from which they are put and answered. In the context of what constitutes Jain identity, with each author in the volume supplying his or her own sense of what is uniquely Jain, the editor summarizes the approach that can be adopted: "A person, text, or community can adopt an exclusivist stance: the other is wrong, and the proper strategy is either to refute and convert or to destroy the other.... But a person, text, or...