The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship

309 Pages·1994·19.74 MB·English

by  Caroline Humphrey

Oxford Studies in
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Editorial Board
John Davis Luc De Heusch Caroline Humphrey
Emily Martin Peter Rivière Marilyn Strathern
THE ARCHETYPAL ACTIONS OF RITUAL
OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIAL
AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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THE ARCHETYPAL
ACTIONS OF
RITUAL
A THEORY OF RITUAL ILLUSTRATED BY
THE JAIN RITE OF WORSHIP
CAROLINE HUMPHREY
and
JAMES LAIDLAW
CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD
1994
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© Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw 1994
First published 1994
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Humphrey, Caroline.
The archetypal actions of ritual: an essay on ritual as action
illustrated by the Jain rite of worship/Caroline Humphrey and
James Alexander Laidlaw.
(Oxford studies in social and cultural anthropology)
—
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Jainism Rituals. 2. Worship (Jainism) 3. Ritual.
—
I. Laidlaw, James Alexander. II. Title. III. Series.
BL1376.H86 1994 294.4'38—dc20 94-1005
ISBN 0-19-827788-1
ISBN 0-19-827947-7 (Pbk.)
13579 10 8642
Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King's Lynn
PREFACE
One day we went to see our Jain friend Ravindra Golecha in his villa in
the suburbs of Jaipur. We had both worked before, at different times,
among Jains in Jaipur. This visit was to start a new project together, one
which we confidently expected to be manageable in a short time, on the
symbolism of the puja, the ritual of morning worship performed in Jain
temples. Golecha had offered to tell us all about it. When we arrived, a
man dozing in the shadow of the verandah rose to show us through to a
ground-floor room, which was tightly shuttered against the sun. Here we
found Golecha, and some other dignified old men, comfortably reclined
on a huge mattress, playing cards. Several younger men lounged at the
sides watching and a little girl lay sprawled asleep in the centre of the
group. Slightly taken aback at our arrival, Golecha nevertheless jumped to
his feet, and brushing aside our apologies for disturbing him, took us
inside the house to a more suitable place for our conversation. This was
his bedroom, which was on an upper floor, reached by passing through the
dining room and skirting round the kitchen where some of the women of
the house were preparing food. Here in the bedroom we found Golecha’s
wife fast asleep on a capacious bed. To our embarrassment she was
unceremoniously dismissed and sent to bring tea and biscuits. We were all
seated on the bed: Ravindra himself, James, Caroline, and Anju Dhaddha,
our assistant, who comes from another of Jaipur’s prominent Jain families.
‘Now’, said Golecha, with a beaming smile, ‘ask me your questions. It is
my duty to tell you about Jainism, it is a religious duty.’ He proceeded to
tell us about some of the minutely detailed ‘rules which must be followed’
to be a good Jain.
This encounter was not exceptional, just one of many conversations we
had with Jain people in their homes. But it hints at some of the things we
came to find so difficult to understand and which transformed our limited
project into something unmanageable (and to which this book is only a
partial and imperfect answer). What was this combination of languid
informality with the exacting and multifarious ‘rules which must be fol­
lowed’? What was this ‘religious duty’ which so firmly and generously
displaced everything else going on in the household? Though we knew
Golecha quite well, it was apparent that it was because of our religious
purpose that we were invited into the sanctum of his bedroom. It was
because he thought of us as seekers after the truth about Jainism that he
said, ‘You are my family.’ There was nothing set apart about his religion,
no hint that it only really applied to particular places (the temple) or with
particular people (other Jains). In fact, the rules and precepts of Jainism
are fastidiously, even relentlessly applied to every aspect of life. The very
biscuits which were brought to us had to conform, and were used as an
occasion to explain how the central Jain doctrine of non-harming (ahimsa)
is applied. Each of their ingredients is classified and rigorously inspected
for the presence of tiny life-forms, and they must be produced by non­
violent means; the heat of the stove, for example, should not harm insects.
Could we possibly describe how ‘Jain sentiments’ arise from an infinite
number of such occasions?
Most of our work was conducted in the Dadabari temple, where we
knew many of the congregation from our previous visits. Just after dawn,
in the comparative cool of the early morning, the bicycle repair shops and
dried-dung makers were already busy in the streets outside, and a steady
stream of immaculately clad Jains was arriving at the temple: making their
way on foot, or alighting from cars and rickshaws, bearing their offerings
to the Jinas, the founding teachers of the Jain religion. The temple is a
clean-swept, quiet enclave, with its own garden and dwelling-hall for the
occasional passing ascetics, Jain monks or nuns, who spend their time
wandering from town to town, preaching Jain doctrines to their followers.
We used to station ourselves in a shaded alcove in the garden, between the
entrance and the temple itself. Here, we would talk with lay Jain worship­
pers as they came by. We spent many hours watching people perform the
puja, and then discussing with them what they had just done. In time, we
too learnt to perform the puja. After morning worship people used to drift
home for a meal before the day’s work, but no one was in a rush, and as
with Golecha, we felt that people were genuinely happy to talk about their
religion. Little groups would form in the shade of our alcove. A temple
servant brought tea and listened genially to our conversations. Occasion­
ally he would rouse himself to chase away a monkey or a peacock. A single
bell would clang as a worshipper entered the temple; every so often the
birds in the garden would screech or chatter.
The puja, we discovered, is a ‘forest of symbols’; but these symbolic
meanings were different from the religious meaning of objects in everyday
life. In puja, each item brought as an offering is likely to be given one or
more propositional meanings. For example, sweets might be given the
meaning, ‘these are for the attainment of spiritual contentment’. In the
everyday world things such as biscuits must be made and used in accord­
ance with Jain principles, and they can become the subject of a lengthy
religious discourse, but the biscuits remain just biscuits, items of food.
They have ‘significance’ in the widest sense, but they do not refer to or
express propositions. With puja offerings, on the other hand, people were
happy to declare multifarious, but in each case specific ‘meanings’. Some­
times these seemed to have been plucked from the air in response to our
questioning, and no one was perturbed that different individuals prof­
fered quite different such definite ‘meanings’ for the same object or act.
As the days passed we grew increasingly puzzled: what were these ‘mean­
ings’ which seemed so weighty in import, and yet so lightly and variously
applied? Why did they not, as we had expected, add up to a system?
Our Jain respondents were invariably and unfailingly polite, but it was
not long before we were being given the idea—particularly by some of the
older men—that we had chosen the wrong subject. Why were we so
interested in this mere ‘empty ritual’? Some tried to guide us away from
our topic, the kind of secondary and ‘external’ thing that foreigners would
latch on to. We knew, of course, that other Jain orders had renounced
temples and worship of statues of the Jinas. It was disconcerting to find
nevertheless that some adherents of these orders came regularly to the
Dadabari to perform puja. And it was not only these people who expressed
restrained disapproval of our research. The basic idea was universal:
anything of any religious value that can by done through puja can be done
better in other ways.
Part of the reason we had chosen this subject was that even casual
observation reveals that this form of worship is performed with sincerity
and piety, and is a central part of people’s religious lives. But our Jain
friends’ opinion was to change the direction of our own ideas completely.
It became clear to us that to develop an adequate account of Jain religious
practice we had to raise some difficult questions about the problematic
status of ritual in general. We had to make sense of the variety of meanings
that we were told the puja has, and yet to take seriously the fact, insep­
arable ethnographically from this feast of ‘meanings’, that the ritual is
declared by those who practise it to be meaningless. To do this, we had to
raise fundamental questions about the understanding of ritual in general,
and abandon many of the assumptions behind current anthropologi­
cal thinking about ritual. In the end we had to develop a new theory of
ritual action.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are very grateful to all the people in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and other
parts of western India, who helped us with our enquiries about Jainism
and the puja. The following people were especially kind and generous
with their time and knowledge: the late Pravartini Sajjan Shri ji Maharaj
Saheb, Gani Shri Mani Prabh Sagar ji Maharaj Saheb, Sadhvi
Priyadarshana Shri ji Maharaj Saheb, Dr N. K. Baz, Dr Narendra
Bhanavat, Dr Hukamchand Bharilla, Mr and Mrs P. L. Dagga, Mr Kamal
Kant Dagga, Mr and Mrs H. Dhaddha, Mr S. L. Gandhi, Mr Prem
Chand Jain, Mr and Mrs S. C. Jain, Shri Jyoti Kumar Kothari, Mrs
Sunita Meharchandani, Mrs Anju Dhaddha Mishra, Shri Dhanroopmal
Nagori, the late Mrs Phophalia, Mr Rajendra Kumar Shrimal, the late
Shri Rajroop-ji Tank, Mrs Saceti, Dr K. C. Sogani, Kavita Srivastava,
Meenu Srivastava, and Dr (Mrs) Pawan Surana.
All through our research, but especially in 1985, we were given encour­
agement, academic advice, and most generous practical help by the then
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rajasthan, Professor T. K. N.
Unnithan, and by Mrs Unnithan. We are grateful also to Professor N. K.
Singhi, of the Department of Sociology in the University of Rajasthan, for
his valuable insights into Jain society. The original intention of our 1985
fieldwork was to make a video film together with a paper about the Jain
puja, so we were accompanied by our colleague Marcus Banks, who shot
the film. We joined Marcus in editing the film, ‘The Jains: a religious
community of India’, which was produced in the Department of Social
Anthropology, Cambridge University, in 1985. We benefited much from
Marcus’s knowledge of Jainism.
This work started life as a longish paper which we read to an informal
seminar in King’s College, Cambridge. It was the interest of Pascal Boyer,
Keith Hart, Tanya Luhrmann, and Nicholas Thomas that encouraged us
to turn the paper into a book. All along, Pascal’s friendly typed missives
from across the court have pointed us in the direction of new ideas, and he
has commented in detail on successive versions of the work. The follow­
ing people have read all or parts of earlier drafts of the book, and we are
extremely grateful for their comments: Peter Allen, Alan Babb, Stephen
Cherry, John Cort, Paul Dundas, Alan Fiske, Chris Fuller, Alfred
Gell, Tanya Luhrmann, Gananath Obeyesekere, David Owens, Fitz
Poole, Quentin Skinner, Tony Tanner, Giles Tillotson, and Harvey
Whitehouse. An anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press made
particularly detailed and helpful comments and for this too we are grate­
ful. Other people with whom we have discussed our ideas or who have
suggested examples or arguments to us include Bill Brewer, John Drury,
Naomi Eilan, Ernest Gellner, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Nick Humphrey, and
Julian Pears. In April 1991 we read a paper, based on this work, at the
Collège de France and we profited much from long discussions of the
material with Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi.
We should like to acknowledge the generous financial support given by
the Nuffield Foundation and King’s College, Cambridge, which enabled
us to undertake fieldwork together. More generally, James Laidlaw is
grateful for research funding to the Economic and Social Research Coun­
cil and for a research fellowship to King’s College, Cambridge. During
the final period of writing the book, 1990-2, Caroline Humphrey was
supported by a British Academy Research Readership.