The Virtuous Vernacular: Cultivating Jain Women’s Moral Conduct (Śīla) in a Fifteenth-Century Gujarati Story Collection

The fifteenth-century efflorescence of writing in North Indian vernaculars (bhāṣā) includes a voluminous body of works in Māru-Gūrjara (“Old Gujarati”) produced primarily by Śvetāmbara Jain monks. This literature is led, in sheer volume of pages, by story literature. Most of these story collections are found in a genre produced to train novice mendicants, the bālāvabodha. As the name suggests, these story collections illustrate doctrinal points, often functioning as commentaries on older Prakrit and Sanskrit treatises written in an aphoristic style called “garlands of instruction” (upadeśamālās). The issues addressed in these texts range from the finer points of poetic composition to mendicant and lay conduct.

This paper examines one such collection, “The Garland of Instruction on Virtue (Śīla), Illustrated for Novices” (Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha) by the Kharatara Gaccha monk Merusundaragaṇi, on the conduct proper to married laywomen. The Gujarati stories illustrate the points of Jayakīrtī’s eleventh-century Prakrit Śīlopadeśamālā. Produced for a community in Malwa, the 48 stories in this collection draw on themes and characters from the Jain “Universal History,” Prakrit and Sanskrit story collections, the Vyāsa Mahābhārata, and the Vedic corpus. 

Two examples illustrate that women’s “virtue” (śīla) is a matter of restrained personal conduct, epitomized by devotion to one’s husband (pativratā) through marital fidelity and sexual chastity. Moreover, virtuousness becomes the pathway for women to reach the Jain soteriology of liberation (mokṣa). In the first example, the Jain “virtuous woman” (satī) Narmadāsundarī, marooned by her Śaiva seafaring merchant husband, is forced to defend her chastity at all costs, culminating in her becoming a Jain nun and converting her in-laws. Second, Kṛṣṇa’s wife Satyabhāmā becomes a cautionary tale, showing how a wife’s lack of comportment leads her family into crisis. In both cases, the women face adversity due to minor acts of carelessness that violate both the general Jain ethic of restraint in personal conduct (gupti) and the additional obligations a wife must exercise to preserve her marital family’s reputation and wellbeing. 

The text thus weds the social concerns of communities with individual women’s soteriological potential. This broad view of the Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha becomes possible when we interrogate the text’s raison d’être and its popularity in western India by considering the intersection of mendicants’ intellectual labor and the demands of lay patronage. The text deploys anew longstanding discourses that differentiate soteriological access for women and men seen in polemical exchanges between Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras, as Jaini has shown. Working entirely within a Śvetāmbara framework, however, which accepts the possibility of women attaining liberation (however more difficult than for men), the text’s implied thesis is that Jain laywomen’s soteriological potential rests first in upholding her marital family’s reputation, prior to renunciation. Thus, the text’s production and popularity depend on its linking Jain sectarian lineages and the interests of the caste (jāti) communities who supported them.

Dundas has argued that the selection, arrangement, and tellings of stories served “polemical” functions in inter-sectarian debates among medieval Śvetāmbara mendicant lineages, supporting a lineage’s positions on specific practices and implicitly critiquing their rivals’. Kelting’s work on Jain narratives of virtuous women (satīs) shows how stories change emphasis from canonical to vernacular tellings, often shifting the reason for a woman’s renunciation from developing a distaste (vairāgya) for worldly (married) life to deciding to renounce out of devotion to her husband who preceded her into mendicancy. By focusing on this text and limiting our frame of reference to the fifteenth century, we can see how and why Jain monk-authors linked women’s potential for spiritual liberation to their ability to preserve family and caste honor through discourses of virtue (śīla) embedded in these vernacular stories.

Numerous theories have been proffered to account for the explosion of vernacular literature produced in North India in the fifteenth century. Most focus on the poetic and lyric genres produced by emerging devotional communities focused on the Hindu god Kṛṣṇa that gave rise to the so-called (and now problematized) “Bhakti Movement.” As a corrective, Novetzke and others have recently argued that the rise of “vernacular intellectuals” challenged Sanskritic, Brahmanical elite authority in the “idiom of the everyday.” While this is a compelling new argument, this was not necessarily the case for Jains, who preceded Hindu vernacular intellectuals by as much as a century, which means that vernacularization was not always tied to challenges to elite (male) authority but rather often arose in its very deployment.

For Jain mendicants in the fifteenth century, writing in the vernacular had a great deal to do with producing repertoires of stories to help mendicants and lay communities to connect. Indeed, it was a lay community of Gujarati-speaking Jains in Śaiva-dominated Malwa who commissioned the Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha, likely a small cluster of several mercantile castes linked by sectarian affiliation. Manuscript catalogues show us who sponsored copies of the manuscripts, giving us a sense of the geographical ambit and human pathways of the text’s distribution. The production and distribution of this and similar works of didactic literature dominate the Jain textual corpus in this emerging vernacular register.

These Jain Gujarati story collections show us that vernacular writing projects were also strategic responses to new social contexts solidifying in this period. While much more historical research is needed to understand the ways that Śvetāmbara mendicant lineages (gacchas) forged and maintained their affiliations with specific caste communities, particularly regarding how intellectual and literary agenda became part of the strategies by which caste (jāti) leadership (e.g., pañcāyatas) did more than assent to the religious and even political representative authority of Jain mendicants, here, we see that social prestige and soteriology are rhetorically linked through such vernacular writing projects. In short, the policing of caste status, so often done by policing women’s behavior, is rearticulated as the pathway for Jain women’s soteriology. Attending to Jain monastic leaders’ connections with leaders of caste communities is one important way to understand fifteenth-century strategies for vernacular literary production. Indeed, these relationships and the intellectual and material products they have produced remain central to understanding the ways that piety and social prestige remain linked in India for Jains, Hindus, and others.