Narratives linked to Jain festivals are often painted on the walls of Jains temples. They are also re-enacted by Jain laypeople, using sculptures. This talk will compare 20th-and 21st-century temple wall paintings of the Digambara narrative linked to Rakhi, or Rakṣā Bandhan, focusing in particular on one painting of the narrative, dated to 1985, in the Lal Mandir in Delhi. It will also discuss the sculpture used in the reenactment of the narrative linked to the festival Akṣaya Tṛtīyā in Palitana, Gujarat, in May 2024. Both of the narratives linked to these festivals emerged in the medieval period as “Jain” responses to Brahminic rituals, and we can see this in the iconography of the narrative portrayals.
The first festival this talk will focus on is Rakṣā Bandhana. Rakhi today is known as a day when sisters tie a thread to their brothers’ wrists to ensure their wellbeing. In Digambara Jain communities, however, laypeople tie threads to the brooms of mendicants to protect them, invoking the story of the mythical Jain monk Viṣṇukumāra, who protected 700 Jain mendicants from the tortures of the evil king Bali by binding him up. Tracing the history of this story’s link to the festival shows that this modern Jain interpretation reinterprets older, medieval Brahminical traditions, which linked the festival to the story of the Vāmana, the dwarf incarnation of Viṣṇu who defeated the king Bali. Medieval Brahminical ritual manuals on the festival prescribe that the king’s royal chaplain, a brahmin, on this day should tie a thread on the king just as Vāmana did to Bali to convert him to righteousness. Therefore, while modern Hindus primarily see the Rakhi as a festival of brotherly-sisterly love, existing Jain practices show that it had its roots in a Brahminical practice designed to gain the king’s favor.
In the material culture that represents this narrative of Viṣṇukumāra, we can see how they respond to Brahminic ideology and even depict Jain monks with iconography more common to depictions of brahmin men. In texts such as the late-eighth-century Harivaṃśapurāṇa, and Prabhācandra’s c. eleventh-century Sanskrit commentary (ṭīkā) on Samantabhadra’s text on lay conduct, the Ratnakaraṇḍaka Śrāvakācāra (RkŚr), Viṣṇukumāra is always named as a Jain monk. However, paintings of the tale replicate paintings of the Vāmana tale and have him clothed as a brahmin, wearing a dhoti and upper garment. In the paintings, Bali bows at his feet in defeat and later offers him alms. Viṣṇukumāra is a Digambara Jain monk, but as he accepts the alms, he is still clothed, dressed as a brahmin.
The second festival this talk will focus on is “Inexhaustible Third,” Akṣaya Tṛtīyā (April-May), which celebrates the first fast-breaking of Ṛṣabha, the first tīrthaṅkara. Medieval Brahminical Purāṇas claim that on this day, one should make donations to brahmin male priests and offer food and water to the souls of deceased ancestors. By at least the eighth century, in the Harivaṃśapurāṇa, Jain narratives had reinterpreted Akṣaya Tṛtīyā as the day on which Ṛṣabha, finally received alms of sugarcane juice from King Śreyāṃsa after spending 13 ½ months fasting, looking for a pious almsgiver. While early Jain accounts of this myth do not name the date of the fast-breaking, only a place – Hastinapur, a prominent north Indian city when these Jain texts were composed in the first few centuries CE – inserting the date of Ṛṣabha’s fast-breaking into medieval accounts allowed Jains to move the location of this event away from Hastinapur to pilgrimage sites important to the Jain community. By the thirteenth century, Jain texts began to associate the fast breaking with the site it is linked to today, Palitana, in western India, where thousands of Jains today travel on to break their fasts of 13 ½ months.
In the celebration of Akṣaya Tṛtīyā in May 2024, this narrative was reinacted by Jain laypeople. A Jain layman, dressed as Śreyāṃsa, pretended to feed a statue of Ṛṣabha sugarcane juice, and this statue, in one way in particular, made Ṛṣabha look like a brahmin: it featured a tuft of hair, or a śikhā, that brahmin men engaged in fire sacrifices must keep tied, only untying it in moments of impurity. To have Ṛṣabha have an untied śikhā represents him as a brahmin man who has renounced the fire sacrifice and the rituals of married life.
This talk will thus show the ways in which Jains, in responding to dominant Brahminic narratives and rituals, reified Brahminic ideology, effectively arguing that Jain monks are the true brahmins. Jains have, through their critiques of the practices of certain brahmins, preserved Brahminic ideology and ritual culture – especially ideas about caste, gifting, proper worship, and purity – not as a separate religion from Jainism, but as part of Jainism itself.
What do Jain monks look like in paintings of the narratives linked to Jain festivals? This presentation will address this question by looking at 20th-and 21st-century temple wall paintings and sculptures, from Delhi, Hastinapur, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. It will focus on the narratives linked to two Jain festivals: Akṣaya Tṛtīyā, which commemorates the first fast-breaking of the first Jina, Ṛṣabha, and Rakhi, or Rakṣā Bandhan, which commemorates the Jain monk Viṣṇukumāra’s rescue of 700 Digambara monks from the fiery torments of a king’s minister-turned king, Bali. In the paintings and sculptures representing these narratives, Jain monks look like brahmins. The Śvetāmbara sculptures related to Akṣaya Tṛtīyā portray Ṛṣabha with a śikhā, or a tuft of hair required of brahmins initiated into the Vedic sacrifice. Digambara paintings of the Rakhi narrative also have a monks wearing a śikhā, and they even portray Digambara monks as wearing clothes: a white dhoti and upper garment. This material culture, when put in conversation with the written narratives of these festivals, from the medieval period to the present day, shows how these festivals emerged as a way to argue that Jain monks are the true brahmins.