“Money and Masculinity in Late Capitalist Jainism” evaluates contemporary Jain representations of capitalism and neoliberalism as expressed in interviews, Jain magazines, and biographies of Jain laymen, teases out continuities from Jainism’s mythic pasts to its contemporary religious practices. Jain laymen harness their business skills to Jain ideals of religious donation and virtues—such as generosity, practical wisdom, and trustworthiness—based on practical knowledge and skills to Jain virtue shaping men’s participation in economic piety. In the context of the liberalization of the Indian economy, neoliberalism’s impact on Jain masculinity can be traced through laymen’s donation patterns and priorities. Bourdieu’s construction of cultural capital especially among the petit bourgeois provides a useful tool for considering the prestige negotiations of contemporary middle-class Jain laymen. In order to rise to the status of a notable Jain layman, it is necessary to have sufficient command over capital to be able to make substantial donations (sometimes on relatively short notice), sufficient knowledge of the arcane rules of Jain donation and funding, and finally a layman must also demonstrate merchant skills alongside Jain piety. If a layman were to be missing one of these kinds of financial and cultural capital, his claims to prestige and notable status would be challenged or dismissed by the community. Discussions about the relative claims of Jain laymen for status were a common and remarkably public part of Jain discourse.
This talk begins considering the construction of a Jain masculine identity that is at the same time both linked to traditional models of great Jain laymen and to modern Jain laymen’s class and social aspirations. The edifying and normative stories from which both Jain mendicants and laymen draw the ideals of lay religiosity and Jain masculinity to lift up exemplars—the Mahaseths (great merchants) and sanghpatis (congregational leaders)—whose lives cannot be fully mirrored, but which serve as templates for greatness. These exemplars are likewise named over and over as examples of Indian indigenous capitalists who are often credited by laymen for bringing modernity to those places where they established their businesses.
In communities such as the Jains where well-being and masculinity are publicly expressed through capital, much can be gained from examining the strategies deployed by men whose middle-class economic status limits their ability to participate in such material expressions of key values. Jains are enjoined in normative Jain literature to build temples as a religious obligation; but building a temple is expensive, so this obligation has been the nearly exclusive provenance of wealthy Jain laymen—from kings to a handful of captains of industry representing the pinnacle of indigenous South Asian capitalism. For lower-middle-class Jain laymen, participation in these temple-building donation patterns is unattainable. And yet, they valourize these great merchants as models for their own engagement with economic piety.
In this talk, I will discuss how these two intersecting models are reimagined in the language of neoliberal capitalism and how that reimagining presents contemporary Jain laymen with new opportunities for participation. The imperative of modern masculinity shapes how Jain laymen must negotiate the tensions between participating and winning at traditional Jain masculinity—the family man who is a generous religious donor—and integrating the economic pressures of neoliberal capitalism and its attendant individualism. I am particularly concerned with how individuals have adapted modernist discourses, such as democratization, and the liberalization of the Indian economy, in order to open space for building a new kind of Jain masculinity.
This paper evaluates contemporary Jain representations of capitalism and neoliberalism as expressed in interviews, Jain magazines, and biographies of Jain laymen, teases out continuities from Jainism’s mythic pasts to its contemporary religious practices. In communities such as the Jains where well-being and masculinity are publicly expressed through capital, much can be gained from examining the strategies deployed by men whose middle-class economic status limits their ability to participate in such material expressions of key values. The imperative of modern masculinity shapes how Jain laymen must negotiate the tensions between participating and winning at traditional Jain masculinity—the family man who is a generous religious donor—and integrating the economic pressures of neoliberal capitalism and its attendant individualism. Individuals have adapted modernist discourses, such as democratization, and the liberalization of the Indian economy, in order to open space for a new kind of Jain masculinity.