Nirgranth Aitihasik Lekh-Samuccay.

• Author: Cort, John E.
• Position: Book review

Nirgranth Aitihasik Lekh-Samuccay. By MADHUSUDAN DHANKI [M. A. Dhaky.] Sresthi Kasturbhai Lalbhai Sreni, vols. 4-5. Ahmedabad: SRESTHI KASTURBHAI LALBHAI SMARAKNIDHI, 2002. Pp. 24 + 348, 20 + 304, 88 photographs. Rs. 500 per vol.

M. A. Dhaky is well known as one of India's leading architectural and art historians; his editorship of the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture in particular has earned him the debt of art historians for decades to come. But he is equally important in the world of Indian scholarship for his extensive writings on Jainism--or, as he prefers to call it, the Nirgrantha philosophy (nirgrantha darsana). Most of these writings have been in Gujarati or Hindi, and the sad fact is that three decades after Padmanabh S. Jaini wrote "few Western scholars show any acquaintance with the vast amount of work published in Hindi (and/or Gujarati)" in Jain studies, the situation is little changed. (1) Part of the problem is linguistic, as many European and American scholars, especially those trained in classical Indian languages, do not at the same time have adequate proficiency in the Indian vernaculars in which an ever increasing quantity of scholarship is appearing. But the problem is also one of access, as much of this vernacular scholarship appears in Indian scholarly journals to which very few if any European or American university libraries subscribe, and which are oftentimes equally difficult to access in Indian university libraries. We are therefore grateful when the collected essays of a scholar as important as M. A. Dhaky are collected and made more readily accessible.

In his introduction Dhaky traces the evolution of his scholarly interests, which in the beginning were focused on archaeology and architectural history, particularly in western India. He turned to the extensive literature of the Jains for help in situating these material remains. As he worked with Jain literature, he became increasingly aware of the many problems of chronology that beset the history of Jain literature. This problem is made more acute as one ventures into the earliest strata of Jain literature. As he points out, the Ardhamagadhi of the earliest Jain texts has been overlaid since the second century with layers of Maharashtri Prakrit. One therefore has to employ great caution in the conclusions one derives about matters of history and chronology from textual studies. Further, Dhaky explains, he found that much of the extant scholarship on Jainism, whether by Jains themselves or by non-Jains (both...