The story of Tamil Jainas

The book brings into sharp clarity not just the fact of Tamil Jainas but the meaning of identity and the loss by its blurring in a self-preoccupied and myopic society.

J AINAS in Tamil Nadu, yes. But as northern India’s distinctive gift to the south. Mainstream Jainas, they are called. Marwaris doing business in the State, pawn-broking from behind grilled doors, speaking a confident if quaint Tamil; their womenfolk in distinctive attire, heads and even faces covered, are a familiar feature of Tamil Nadu’s urban and suburban life. Their philanthropy is prodigal, if their business practices are shrewd. Sensing a growing market for different foods, they run a thriving Jaina food chain in Chennai, with restaurants and home deliveries of their own distinct vegetarian, non-tuber victuals.

A Gujarati Jain lady in south Chennai who has been supplying quality food to many in her neighbourhood has only recently and reluctantly included the potato in her range—“Everyone we served urged …please, add potato.” An educational society set up by them runs a college in Chennai and aids several schools.

For a reason I cannot fathom, they have shown a lively interest in assisting people, invariably poor people, suffering from ophthalmic conditions. Eye camps have been organised by them with zeal and generosity. This has saved eyes, won hearts.

But the concept of a Tamil Jaina, in the sense of a Tamil who is Jaina, or a Jaina who is Tamil, is intriguing, and fascinating. A Tamil Christian or a Tamil Muslim would, to use a Tamil-English expression, be “normal only”, but a Tamil Jaina? That person would come as a surprise as much as, say, a Tamil Sikh would. But this impression is wholly ahistorical, the result of our—us Indians’—typical ignorance of and indifference to our surroundings, especially human surroundings.

The Tamil Jaina is and has been for centuries a fact. Yet most of us, the non-Jaina majority, have not noticed her or him. It is of course all too easy to assume the Tamil Jaina to be a Tamil Hindu. He or she does not look, speak or dress any differently from a Tamil Hindu.

I mentioned ophthalmic conditions in a preceding paragraph. Opticians have in their stock an array of trial lenses which they slide into an empty test-frame for their visitor to read the chart on the wall in front. The enlarged A being read easily, the less enlarged X and O in the line below is also easy enough, but trouble starts with the smaller T V H in the third line and becomes big-time trouble in the fourth line with the hazy U…or is it O…A…M…no…X. Then off goes the trial lens and in comes another to either make the hazy three letters hazier or spring into the sharpest view, which is when you say: “Right! Very clear—U A X !”

R. Umamaheshwari’s Reading History with the Tamil Jainas (Springer, 2017), which has an important subtitle, A Study on Identity, Memory and Marginalisation, is like the perfect new lens. It gives us a major corrective to our intellectual understanding, bringing into the sharpest clarity not just the fact of the Tamil Jainas but the meaning of identity and the loss by its blurring in a self-preoccupied and myopic society. Based on her PhD thesis, this book is a pair of lenses that tests our knowledge of our knowledge, our ignorance of our ignorance. It gives us clarity. And the reader then wants to say: “Right, I can see that. Very clear.”

Jainas of Thanjavur

Going through its pages made me recall the time when I first became aware of Tamil Jainas. This was in Thanjavur, in the year 1969. I had just joined duty in the district as an Assistant Collector under training. The District Collector was T. V. Antony, an exemplary and esteemed officer who told me on my first call on him that after “taking over” in the collectorate, I should meet the “HS” to learn all there is to be learnt about the working of that office. Too nervous to ask him what “HS” meant, I later asked Appavoo, the kindly clerk who had been assigned to me—a genius of his own type—what those initials meant. “Huzur Sheristadar”, he said, pronouncing the two words of Persian ancestry with as much respect as their aural scope permitted, and went on to explain that the HS was generally the prop and pillar of the collectorate. On my asking what the HS’ name was, he said, again with a respect bordering on awe: “Parsvanathan.”

“Pars…?”

“ Aaamaanga Sir, Parsvanathan… Jaina.”

“Jaina? From up north, settled here?”

“ Illinga Sir, native. Native Tamil Jaina. Tanjore Jaina.”

The handsome Thanjavur Collectorate (now a museum), built in 1896, had the Collector’s chambers on its first floor. Going from there down the spiral stairway to the HS’ chambers located for petitioners’ convenience, on the ground floor, I entered the second or third biggest room in the building. This only befitted the HS’ station and rank. Meeting the HS was an experience of its own kind. He was big in every sense. Portly, beaming, he rapidly explained to me in a mix of Tamil and English all that the collectorate was about, the kind of petitions it received, how they were registered and distributed to various sections for “action”, what my work as a magistrate would entail. Tuition over, he paused to answer questions. I had almost none for the HS but did, for Parsvanathan Sir.

Answering my questions about his name, he said it derived from one of the 24 Jaina Tirthankaras (I did not know then they numbered 24). And when I queried him further about Tamil Jainas, he said with becoming modesty that he was not a scholar of the subject but could say that they numbered a few thousand thinly spread all over the State and that Thanjavur district itself had a small but old Jaina population in the countryside as also “many Jaina shrines”. I noted his using the word “shrines” in preference to “temples”.

I came away from that first meeting with Huzur Sheristadar Parsvanathan pondering the significance of a Tamil Jaina holding a Persian-origin office in the highly Saivite district of Thanjavur of which the immensely popular Collector was a Syrian Christian.

Another thought occurred fleetingly to me. If there are Jainas “in the countryside” of Thanjavur, they must be into agriculture. How does that square with what I have read in Romila Thapar’s Ancient India about Jainas regarding cultivation as inherently violent on account of what the plough does to creatures living on and beneath the soil? But what with a tight schedule of training under the vigilant eye of Collector Antony taking over my days, I soon forgot all about Jainas, Tamil or otherwise.

Posted next as Assistant Collector in Tindivanam, I got to know a mainstream Jaina in the town. He was a popular figure in the town’s civic life and went on to become a Member of the Legislative Assembly. Although I had gathered that some Jainas lived in and around the town of Gingee, with its big boulders and stunning fort, neither chance nor design made me visit the Jainas there, a singular lapse and regret on my part.

Sittannavasal

I would have remained disconnected with the subject but for my visits, over 1974 and 1975, to Tamil Nadu’s Pudukkottai district while editing the District Gazetteer. I had read about the Sittannavasal rock and caves in Romila Thapar’s work and in K.M. Panikkar’s Survey of Indian History . But now the rock itself loomed into view, large as life, overshadowing by its sheer physicality anything one may have read or heard about it. The imposing massif of magnificent height and width rose from the plains in an audacious surge. An eagle gyrated above us as my colleagues and I approached the famous cave in which reposed bas-reliefs of Tirthankaras (including Parsvanatha) and others. It was dark inside and I took a minute or two to be able to even make out the faint frescoes on its walls. The Samava-sarana, or “Heavenly Pavilion”, motif made sense slowly but clearly, with its elephants and buffaloes, geese and lotuses and damsels.

Two visitors came over the next few months to see and write about it for the Gazetteer—M. Krishnan, the photo-naturalist, and Salim Ali, the great birdman. Krishnan, to photograph and write about the animal themes in the painting, and Salim sahib to comment on the bird motifs. I accompanied them. There is no such thing as seeing too much of Sittannavasal. Krishnan took some remarkable photographs of the cave and frescoes in natural light but was unimpressed by the depiction of the elephants. They look neither Asian nor African, he declared. And as to the geese, he muttered something to the effect that they were neither fish nor fowl.

Salim sahib took a long and close look at the frescoes and did some identifications, but he too felt the bird portrayals reflected poor observation skills. But both of them—like I had been—were quite taken up by the site itself. The dark and long and jagged-stone covered karadi guhai (bear cave or tunnel), through which we crawled, made arrival at the exit a matter of relief as well as rapture.

The cave tunnel opens to what is about the most precipitous surface that can be imagined. Sloping on to a sheer drop of several hundred feet, its granite surface has some 17 “beds” carved on it with “pillow arrangements” at one end. Jaina ascetics rested on those after their severe penances, or perhaps did their penances on them. If any of them slept too soundly and unwittingly turned, he would have rolled straight down to a nirvana other than the one he was striving for. The rigour and perseverance of the carvers and the meditators is something to behold, contemplate on. Most of the beds have inscriptions.

Sittannavasal represents a peak of attainments—aesthetic, spiritual, physical. Said to have been “active” for a full millennium from the first century BCE to 900 C.E., with Tamil Brahmi Jaina inscriptions having been discovered in rock-cut caves or natural caverns across Tamil Nadu, the iconic Tamil anthologies Purananuru and Cilappatikaram replete with Jaina references, one cannot but ask when did that Tamil Jaina culture commence, when did it peak, and when did it begin to retreat, where to and why?

In her book, Umamaheshwari seeks to ask these and more questions of herself and answers them with what can only be called academic stoicism. She does not spare herself any exertion, any exploration, whether from work on texts or work in the field. Going by epigraphs, literature and available research on the subject and then enriching textual knowledge by conversations with Tamil Jaina communities in her real time, she excavates the story of Tamil Jainas.

And what a story it is, from Sittannavasal to now!

Minuscule minority

She tells us that in 2003, according to the Jaina Youth Forum, Tamil Jainas numbered 32,700, which makes them a minuscule minority. But then Jainas as such, at an aggregated population of about seven million today, are exactly that the world over. She quotes A.P. Aravazhi, president of the Samanar Peroli Iyakkam, as saying on the Jainas’ avocations, “Most of us are agriculturists. Some of us are self-employed, a few employed in small positions in shops and some other vocations…”

As one goes through the heavily researched, closely annotated and cross-referenced work what emerges, like the Sittannavasal outcrop, is an imposing swell of happenings and achievements that encompass a range of human endeavour.

The one fact that emerges emphatically from the book is that Tamil Jainas are saturated in Tamil. That is the language of their roots and all their branches. It is for them not just a major identity marker; it is for them a source of sustenance and pride. They believe without a trace of doubt in their minds that Tirukkural is the work of a Jaina master—Kundakundacharya. They accept with a sense of quiet corroboration that when the Telugu and Tamil scholar and Madras civilian F.W. Ellis translated the Arattuppaal (Book of Virtue) of the Kural, he did so in the understanding that it was the work of a Jaina. They note that when he, as Collector of Madras, had a gold coin minted of the author of the Kural he showed him to be in the unmistakable likeness of a Jaina muni—sans beard, sans beads and with a head shield.

Of compelling interest to me is the book’s brief treatment of the Ajivika or Ajivaka, the school that some believe, controversially, to be indistinguishable from Digambar Jainas. Be that as it may, the Ajivaka were around before the time of Asoka (reign 262 to 232 BCE) and spread themselves widely if thinly over the whole of what is now India. Asoka’s Banyan Tree Cave edict at Nyagrodha and the Khalatika Hill dedicate those cave dwellings to the Ajivakas who, with the Sramana, he has elsewhere declared to be rightfully deserving of his protection.

The Ajivaka are in Asoka’s edicts the symbol of a minority, a minuscule “minority of minorities”, to use the Jaina scholar Aravazhi’s telling phrase. And to that minority, to its vulnerability of numbers and of lifestyle, he, the Emperor who says famously “All men are my children”, extends protection. Protection from what? From both the cruelty and coarseness of his officers and the disdain of the majority.

Umamaheshwari’s masterful work is about the Tamil Jaina, a minority within a minority, but is more. It is a reminder today of the duty of a state and of a society that is majority-minded towards its marginal people, those that Asoka described as the anta -s, the “end-people”, people at physical and metaphorical borders. And it gives us the story of the Tamil Jaina per se but also as a metaphor for those that hover with insecure feet between being forgotten and being steam-pressed into sameness.

And to that extent the Tamil Jaina cave-carver of a thousand years ago is on the same page as the framers of the Constitution of India who saw the Democracy they were creating as an order where the majority rules but the Republic they were sculpting as the equal home of its biggest majority and its minutest minority.