This panel explores the paradox of Jain economic success and wealth accumulation in relation to the religion’s precepts of non-attachment and ascetic ideal of absolute renunciation. Contributors survey contemporary Jain attitudes towards wealth accumulation in the context of global capitalism, making use of a variety of media and ethnographic data to articulate ways in which Jains redeploy canonical scripture to justify and interpret contemporary practices and attitudes. The case studies under consideration center on Jain communities in India and abroad and include a range of occupational groups and social classes, exploring in addition relationships between Jains and adjacent religious communities (Hindu, Muslim) to account for the formation of etic and emic characterizations of Jain economic competence, in addition to broader, inter-religious discourses of “Dharmic capitalism.”
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.
This paper considers Jain participation in discourses of “Dharmic capitalism,” surveying a spectrum of emic attitudes toward the relevance of principle tenants of Jain religion to navigating complexities of 21st century global free market commerce. Making use of interviews, popular media, and popular and academic publications advancing normative and prescriptive viewpoints, the author highlights Jain efforts to locate principles of free market capitalism within their own scriptural tradition, alongside present-day Jain attempts to reconcile the moral vicissitudes of the global financial marketplace with the strict Jain precepts of non-violence, non-possessiveness, and absolute truthfulness. The author examines what are in some cases direct correspondences between Hindu and Jain sentiments regarding the historical presence of liberal economic models in India historically, direct interface between Hindus and Jains which has generated a portion of this discourse, as well as discourses of “Jain exceptionalism,” i.e. insistence that Jain economic success has been historically supplemented with superlative models of philanthropy.
This paper argues for the centrality of an expanded concept of “commercial capitalism” for understanding both the economic practices of Jains in the early 20th century, as well as why this association persists to this day. Following the historian Jairus Banaji, I argue that capitalism is neither simply commercial activity (Adam Smith’s famous “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”) nor reducible simply to heavy industry. Drawing on archival data from Sirohi, a small independent Rajput kingdom, in the late colonial period, this paper puts forward a theory of how commercial capitalists, mostly Jain, came to dominate agrarian production. I then argue, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in modern Rajasthan and Gujarat, that contemporary perceptions of Jains are still primarily structured by this form of capitalism.
While exclusionary forces continue to claim Muslims do not belong in India, specific Muslims are uniquely visible across diverse genres of cultural representation. This paper focuses on the tension between official forms of Muslim exclusion and the visibility of certain types of Muslims in diverse media forms including commercial theatre, Hindi cinema, and heritage tourism. Questions this paper explores include: what kinds of Muslims are “sellable” for twenty-first century forms of cultural consumption? How are the goals and strategies of producers to make Muslims visible in genres of cultural representation shaped by the forces of twenty-first century, late-stage Indian capitalism and neoliberalism? The typologies of desirable Muslims in cultural representation identified in this paper reveal the socio-political conditions of religious belonging not just in India, but also in other secular democratic societies during twenty and twenty-first century late-stage capitalism. More than just simply entertainment, these moments of representation shape knowledge about religion, and particularly Islam, both for Muslims and non-Muslims.