Book review: 'Escaping the World: Women Renouncers Among Jains'

Publisher: Routledge
Pages: 220
Price: Rs695

I first saw a Jain shobha yatra when I was a child. It wound its way down the streets of Pune and I was astonished to learn that the bejewelled girl atop the chariot was neither princess nor bride. Manisha Sethi remarks on this joyous, processional, community send-off, as she describes the diksha (investiture ceremony) in her book about Jain female mendicants. In Escaping the World, Sethi writes, “Like a traditional wedding, which is a union not between two individuals but involves a whole array of kin and other social networks, so too does the diksha galvanise a variety of social groups: gacch (a unit of mendicants and their lay followers), sect and even the local Jain community as a whole.”

Sethi’s title has an ironic note to it — Jain nuns may escape the world of matrimony and the responsibilities of a householder, but they exchange one set of conventions for another. By retreating from the social world and abdicating material rights, they go into a network provided for by the Jain laity. This is a well-oiled and community-financed machinery, because the labha (merit) that a sadhvi brings to the community is immense. This is also unique to Jainism, according to Sethi. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find references in ancient Indian culture where women are given positive encouragement to work at their own personal salvation, abandoning the social responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood.

In Brahminical traditions, a woman is “an obstruction to renunciation” but Jainism stresses upon the ideas of karma-bandhana, (the ties that arise out of one’s karma), nirjara (one of the fundamentals of Jain philosophy which insists upon the shedding of one’s temporal responsibilities in order to be ready for moksha) and moksha, (representing the liberation from all karmic ties and a state of infinite bliss). Every individual must cherish these ideals and work towards them and achieve salvation.

A Jain sadhvi, as Sethi establishes, is not an aberration but a role model for younger girls, often from within the extended family. Sethi interviews Pragiti sri who recounts that her life was run of the mill, until she encountered the sadhvi, Dr Manju sri, when the latter visited Pragiti sri’s city while on a chaturma (a four month retreat that itinerant monks and nuns observe). “What is the aim of your life?” asked Dr Manju sri and seeking the answer to that question led Pragiti sri to become a sadhvi.

Sethi challenges the notion that only destitute or women who are considered somehow damaged — for example, widows — turn to mendicancy. In fact, her data suggests that unmarried girls make up a large percentage of the Jain sadhvis, outstripping any other category, including unmarried males. The choice to become a sadhvi is entirely voluntary.

Escaping the world of marriage doesn’t mean escaping the world of chauvinism entirely. Sethi’s ethnographic fieldwork in northern India is placed against existing sociological theories about female renunciation and offers a feminist perspective on the order. She cautions against seeing  it as ‘indigenous feminism’ as she demonstrates how sadhvis remain within a rigidly-gendered hierarchy.

This book highlights key factors in the lives of the sadhvi, and studies how the implications play out, bringing together information from early monastic codebooks, popular stories, modern cultural theories, and individual case studies with fluency. It opens room for discourse about a fascinating and deep-rooted cultural anomaly within our Indian traditions of asceticism.