Attached Paper Online June Annual Meeting 2025

Digitized Authority, Dynamic Archive: Truth and the Online Biographies of Śrīmad Rājcandra

Papers Session: Jainism and Technology
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

The changeover from print- to internet-based information dissemination relocates religious authority from lineage-based chains of transmission to a hyper-individualized “consumer appeal” model of the bandwidth privileged. This historical process is illustrated here by comparing the online biographies of Śrīmad Rājcandra (1867-1901) of two organizations: one, the Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Agas, Gujarat (AA) (est. 1919); the other, the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission of Dharampur, Gujarat (SRMD) (est. 2001). Regarded as authoritative throughout the 20th century, since 2016 the AA’s online biography has included details found only in the SRMD’s online biography, becoming a “dynamic archive” that authorizes the latter’s version, which simultaneously acknowledges and dismantles both archival- and memory-based challenges to truth-claims. Instead, as the internet is a commercial platform in which all information operates on the logic of capitalist consumption, truth becomes a matter of the superiority of the information producer’s ability to fit into the consumer’s self-image and “lifestyle.”