Rethinking Theorization(s) of Jain Ritual from the Domestic Dying Space

Anthropological attention to ritual hones an understanding of how quotidian practices may carry an aura of ritualization and provide a different perspective on our understanding of ritual—seen not as a spectacle that is cordoned off from everyday life, but as indications of how a commitment to living in a particular way and inhabiting the world with others finds expression in the ritualization of quotidian everyday acts. The extreme ascetic orientation idealized in Jainism has led most scholars of Jain studies to read the tradition’s texts and their negotiation as having (ambiguous) life within lay practice. There is great diversity in studies of specific ritual acts in Jainism, from puja (Babb 1988, 1994, 1998; Laidlaw 1995) or idol devotion (Carrithers & Humphrey 1994) and consecration (Cort 2006; Gough 2017) to the recitation of the arhaṃ mantra (Gough 2020), or particular ritual functions, such as ıryāpathikīpratikraman, the practice of repentance for violence during movement (Dundas 2011). However, the larger theorizations that derived from and informing these studies are fewer (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994), and maintain a perspective that subordinates lay religiosity to lesser versions of mendicant vows or frames popular ritual practices in the framework of similarity, difference, or eclectic and syncretic elements of Brahmanical ritual traditions. 

In this paper, I lay out what these elaborations of Jain ritual culture and action, which produce an ontology of ritual acts based on longstanding works in ritual theory (Bell 1992; Staal 1979, 1989; Singer 1972), both illuminate and obscure about Jain ritual. In particular, works by anthropologists Lawrence Babb (1996), Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw (1994) exemplify in different ways what I point to as a focus on the way Jain ritual has been used in formal ritual spaces, and how even gestures toward the rich potentiality of “divine absence” have been framed within an enduring focus on the “problem” of ascetic renunciation and Jainism’s place in the wider Indic religious world.

The example par excellence of ritualized Jain moral non-action is fasting. Fasting has been schematized as belonging to the category of tapasya or austerities, and fasts are distinct ritual acts insofar as they are constituent parts of “whole rituals,” which are defined by and comprised of doctrinal categories. Perhaps for this reason, the practice of sallekhanā, the voluntary fast until death, has not been the focus for theorizing Jain ritual. Indeed, it has not been theorized as ritual, apart from minor discussion about transgression of doctrinal correctness in popular practice, even when it is referred to or characterized as “a ritual fast until death.”

Resting on this evaluation of the picture of ritualized action that emerges from prevailing theorizations of Jain ritual, I engage ethnography to consider how ritualization of quotidian acts and domestic and other spaces are left out of these theorizations. Integrating these spaces and acts into a picture of Jain ritual allows for an understanding of the wider dispersed ethical sensibilities of asceticism that lead to lay practice of sallekhanā as a materialization of Jain ethical life in a form of death. A ritual of austerity or abstinence is thus mistaken for a death ritual, since culmination in death is assumed to be not just a single constitutive element, but constitutive of the ritual commitment itself.

In this paper, I attend to three specific issues through which I amplify this way of viewing ritual theory and practice. First, in response to existing theorization of Jain ritual action, how might we make a shift from thinking of ritual as a collection of specific desegregated acts to thinking of ritual culture as derived from larger religious and ethical commitments with a foothold in everyday life?  Even such dramatic practices as “fast unto death” can be traced back to life-long practices of training oneself through small acts of renouncing, foregoing, limiting one’s desires, into preparations for becoming a Jain in its fullness. Second, how are quotidian acts ritualized by Jains, particularly Jain women, in domestic life in ways that prepare them for undertaking sallekhana? Third, what does empirical attention to gender reveal about how interpreting sallekhana only through previously theorized ideas of ritual function and efficacy may not be sufficient to account for other criteria of ritual correctness?

This dispersed ethical sensibility of asceticism, which may be ritually adopted through the medium of the body and its desires in the space of the domestic, prepares women to live life in a certain modality and eventually, perhaps, undertake more dramatic enactments of ritual fasting in sallekhanā. My argument rests on two anthropological conceits. First, that what counts as Jain ritual is less a question of constitutive rules for ascetic conduct or doctrinally prescribed acts, and more what counts in particular contexts. Second, and relatedly, while conventional theorizations of Jain ritual have focused exclusively on the textual tradition, or practice in formal ritual spaces, here I look to the expression of ritual as it suffuses everyday life. Sallekhanā in the ethnographic perspective therefore presents an alternative vision of Jain ritual and ritualized action.