The Invention of Jainism: A Short History of Jaina Studies

Abstract

The article provides a short summary of the institutional history of the new field of 'Jain Studies' in its historical and political context. It shows that the Sanskrit term 'Jaina' used as a self-designation (rather than as the designation of a doctrine or in the sense of 'pertaining to the Jina') is based on the vernacular precursor 'Jain' which became prevalent from the early modern period onwards - most likely as an internalised observer category. The words 'Jain' and 'Jainism' became widely used only in the context of 19th communal movements in colonian India. At the same time the Jain scriptures were published to back the identity claims of the Jaina law movement and modern 'Jainism' as a disembodied text-based set of idea-ologies or dogmas from which one can pick and chose was born.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.