Writing History and Jain Literary Production in Early Modern South Asia

Abstract

This article focuses on the social existence of the Jain community, as exhibited in literary production in early modern India. The existing historiography sometimes tends to make Jain epistemology subservient to contemporary political culture. One must be cautious in approaching the tension between identitarian stability and identitarian volatility and between social textures and cultural mobility beyond the binarities of literary cultures and mundane survival with reference to our existing knowledge of Jainology. The volatile world of religiosity in early modern India tended to shape circumstances that both enforced and drew upon polemical meanings arising out of hybrid identities and cultural intermediacy. Therein lie diverse and multiple possibilities of literary discourse on the multiple religious identities at the core of the histories of Jainism in early modern South Asia.