Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb and the Study of the Jains

Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb was among a generation of scholars, both anthropologists and scholars in other fields for whom ethnographic fieldwork was a primary research methodology, who dramatically transformed the study of the Jains in the 1980s and 1990s. Prior to this period there had been a smattering of articles on the Jains based on fieldwork (see John E. Cort, "Recent Descriptive Accounts of the Contemporary Jainas,” in Man in India 66, 1986, 180-87; and "Recent Fieldwork Studies of the Contemporary Jains,” in Religious Studies Review, 23, 1997, 103-11), but no sustained fieldwork research. This changed in the 1980s, with the work of Marcus Banks, Michael Carrithers, Savitri Holmstrom, Caroline Humphrey, James Laidlaw, and Josephine Reynell in the U.K., Alan Babb, John E. Cort, R.S.A. Goonasekera, M. Whitney Kelting, Thomas McCormick, and Thomas Zwicker in the U.S., Anne Vallely and Mikal Radford in Canada, Marie-Claude Mahias and N. Shântâ in France, Peter Flügel and Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg in Germany, and Manisha Sethi in India. Whereas Jain Studies had previously been largely a textual and Indological enterprise, scholarship increasingly focused not only on Jainism but on the Jains, and focused on lived experience as much as doctrines.

            Babb’s scholarship on the Jains was distinctive from many of the other anthropological studies of the Jains in several significant ways. For most of the scholars listed, fieldwork on the Jains marked the beginning of their scholarly agendas. Babb, however, had already engaged in extensive fieldwork on Hindu communities in Chhattisgarh, Singapore and Delhi, and had authored two books and a dozen articles based on this fieldwork. He therefore brought his fieldwork on the Jains into a larger agenda of the anthropological study of religion in India. This was an essential bridge function, as he demonstrated how Jain materials contributed to larger discussions in South Asian Studies of caste, hierarchy, ritual transactions and religious identity. At the same time, bringing these larger conversations with him into the study of the Jains enriched Jain Studies.

            In this paper I look at the three fieldwork periods before Babb commenced his fieldwork on the Jains in Ahmedabad in 1986 and in Jaipur in 1990-91, to show how they shaped the questions he asked of the Jains, and thereby his earlier scholarship tied Jain Studies into larger scholarly discussions. The very title of his 1975 The Divine Hierarchy indicates the debt to Louis Dumont’s version of structuralism. But Babb was equally interested in ritual transactions, a theme that he continued to explore in his articles on popular Hinduism in Singapore, and then in his 1987 Redemptive Encounters in which he studied the urban guru-cults of the Radhasoamis, the Brahma Kumaris, and the followers of Sathya Sai Baba. Among the scholars with whose research Babb’s interacted were leading figures such as McKim Marriott, Jonathan Parry, Gloria Raheja and Thomas Trautmann—and all of them owed an intellectual debt to Marcel Mauss’s 1925 Essai Sur le Don (The Gift). Babb’s scholarship on ritual transactions led directly to his 1996 Absent Lord. I will conclude the paper by showing how a fuller reading of Absent Lord really needs to take into close account Babb’s earlier scholarship on Hindu ritual transactions. The paper will raise questions concerning how the recent renewal of interest in anthropological perspectives on the Jains can benefit from a close rereading of the early work of Babb (and, by extension, the other anthropologists and anthropologically oriented scholars I list above).