The Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Agas, Gujarat was regarded throughout much of the 20th century as the most authoritative source on the life and teachings of the Jain layman Śrīmad Rājcandra (1867-1901). Founded in 1919 by Laghurāj Svāmī (1854-1935), Rājcandra’s chief disciple and a former Sthānakavāsi monk, the Agas Ashram (AA) owned the copyright to Rājcandra’s oeuvre, published multiple editions and translations of his writings, and produced several biographies of him in Gujarati and English, most recently in 1967 for his birth centenary, releasing updated editions as recently as 2004. The structure of one such biography, Mukul Kalarthi’s Shrimad Rajcandra: A Biography (Abridged), translated into English by Digish Mehta, lent its structure and the details of its content to the biography posted on their website, shrimad.com, which I first observed in 2006.
Since at least 2016, the AA’s webpage has included biographical details not previously found in their printed biographies or earlier versions of their online biography, including details related to Rājcandra’s “memory performances” (avadhāna), including locations and observers of key performances, including his putative “śatāvadhāna” or 100-item memory performance. However, these details appear in the biography of Rājcandra published on the website of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission of Dharampur (SRMD). Founded in 2001 by Jain layman and self-styled guru, Rakeshbhai Jhaveri (1966-), calling it a “global movement,” the SRMD has far supplanted the AA as the most popular Rājcandra-oriented devotional organization. In 2006, Emma Salter estimated the worldwide total number of people regularly engaging with Rājcandra and his works at 20,000. As of today, the SRMD alone has over 200 centers worldwide, headquartered at their 223-acre ashram in Dharampur that can accommodate 10,000 visitors at a time, and boasts the largest social media following of any Jain organization: their Facebook following is 1.3 million; their Instagram followers have surpassed half a million.
The SRMD’s popularity took off after they launched a comprehensive social media campaign starting in 2014. The SRMD’s website and social media accounts are geared to appeal primarily to a bandwidth-privileged, transnational Gujarati Jain audience. Its website contrasts sharply with the low-bandwidth format of the AA’s website.
While there is no definitive evidence to prove that the SRMD has made the changes to the AA’s website, or event influenced the revised content, this paper begins to think through the implications of what the AA’s relationship might have been at a key stage in the SRMD’s rise to influence.
The SRMD’s biography portrays Rājcandra as a “modern Jain guru”; it seeks to “prove” his advanced spiritual state through “empirical” evidence ensconced in a historically rich narrative complete with names, dates, and locations of events left vague in the AA’s printed biographies. The AA’s changes to its biography create a virtual feedback loop, effectively authorizing the SRMD’s added details of Rajacandra’s biography by becoming a “dynamic archive” that gives an authoritative source for additional details. The loop between these two sites “mainstreams” the SRMD’s vision of Rajacandra as the ideal spiritual figure embodying their spiritual program, tailored to the sensibilities of upper-class cosmopolitan and diaspora Jains through neoliberal models of hyper-individualism (A. Jain) and “mass self-communication” (Castells). The AA’s website operates as a digital archive, appearing to be a generative source of the SRMD’s authority and its vision of Jain religious identity.
The SRMD’s growth is built on a savvy understanding that the internet is, in practice and in imaginaire, a commercial space that exploits systems of authority and trust to shape a reality advantageous for hyper-individualized commerce. The SRMD is a commercial enterprise whose product is a version of Jain, Gujarati, and Indian identity that meets the demands and expectations of its target audience: upper-class, transnational, Anglophone, mainly Gujarati, Śvetāmbar Jains. This begins with their reformulation of Rājcandra’s biography by simultaneously drawing on the authority of Agas ashram while obliterating its search-engine presence and, over the past decade, its importance as a site of authoritative knowledge about its eponymous guru. The SRMD succeeded, as the AA no longer needs to function to verify its biographical claims about Rājcandra, nor do they hold the rights to his works.
The outcome of the SRMD’s exploitation of the AA’s authority that cultural theorists and religion scholars should take note of is that the SRMD’s “Jain” spirituality works in the service of the Hindu Right’s limited engagements with neoliberalism, which empowers cultural institutions to shape a tailored vision of Indian identity (in this case, “heritage”) in the Sangh Pariwar’s image, and provides a consumable outlet for hyper-individualized merit making, both through the SRMD’s ritual performances and through their charitable wing, both of which are couched as continuations of older Jain discourses and practices of cultural production and merit (puṇya)-making, but which now work in the service of the nation and the logic of capital. And as the internet is the access point for most people’s engagements with the SRMD, its reality is truly rooted in the virtual ecosystem of its website and social media accounts, built on the logic of capital.
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.”