Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950.

• Author: Hatcher, Brian A.

Cooperation, Contribution and Contestation: The Jain Community, Colonialism and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950. Edited by JOHN E. CORT, ANDREA LUITHLE-HARDENBERG, and LESLIE C. ORR. Studies in Asian Art and Culture, vol. 6. Berlin: EB VERLAG, 2020. Pp. 615, plates. [euro]69.

It strikes me that a better title for this volume might have been "Identifying Jainism," since this taxonomic task sits at the heart of the endeavor. This substantial collection of essays grew out of a 2010 conference at the University of Tubingen on "The Jains and the British," which arose in response to the study of a hitherto unpublished early colonial manuscript on the Jains composed by Alexander Walker of Bowland (1764-1831). As early as 1976 Ernest Bender had ascribed authorship of "Narratives of the Mahrattah History and an Account of the Jeyns, or Shravaca Religion" to Walker in a Brief Communication in this journal (vol. 96.1: 114-19). We can now be grateful to Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg--one of the present volume's editors--for returning to the question of how Walker came to collect data on the Jains in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Walker was a close contemporary of the better-known Orientalists in Madras and Calcutta, men like Colin Mackenzie and Henry Thomas Colebrooke; with Walker's manuscript we get the view from Bombay. Here Luithle-Hardenberg's work complements Leslie Orr's efforts to disarticulate the Calcutta and Madras schools of Orientalism (see her "Orientalists, Missionaries and Jains: The South Indian Story," in The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India, ed. Thomas R. Trautmann [Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009], 263-87). Orr's insights are revisited here in a chapter on "European imaginings" of Jainism in colonial South India.

According to Luithle-Hardenberg. Walker proved to be ahead of his time in recognizing the Jains as a distinct religious community. While he acknowledged they often seemed indistinguishable from non-Jain communities, Walker reckoned that "their religious tenets are... different" (quoted p. 69). Having unearthed this early nugget of classificatory knowledge, the essays in this volume proceed to revisit a range of colonial-era scholarship in order to respond to Peter Flugel's assertion that it was not until Hermann Jacobi's 1879 edition of the Kalpa-Siitra of Bhadra-bahu that Jainism was acknowledged to be a distinct religion (see "The Invention of Jainism: A Short History...