THE SCOTTISH DISCOVERY OF JAINISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOMBAY*

MITCH NUMARK

This article examines the encounter between Protestant missionaries and the Jains in nineteenth-century Bombay.1 It focuses on three Scottish missionaryscholars John Wilson (180475), John Murray Mitchell (18151904) and John Stevenson (17981858) who played a leading role in orientalist and ethnographic scholarship coming out of Bombay and, more specically, in the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter, BAS). Of these three Scottish missionaries, only John Stevenson has been credited with a major contribution to Jain studies, notably his translations of the Kalpa Sutra and the Navatattava Prakarana, which were published in 1848 as the Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva: Two Works Illustrative of the Jain Religion and Philosophy.2 However, both John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell produced to a much greater degree and over a much longer period of time than Stevenson something more valuable to the historian seeking to excavate nineteenth-century British ideas of Jains and Jainism: a record of over fty years of contact with Jains living throughout western India. The are a number of reasons why understanding the way in which nineteenthcentury Bombay-based Scottish Protestant missionaries (who were also esteemed orientalists and ethnographers) conceptualised Jainism and understood the Jains might give us a fuller picture of the activities, ideas and encounters of Christian missionaries and orientalists in colonial India. First, the Jains and Jainism have been largely overlooked in the scholarship on British orientalists in India. Second, the Jains and Jainism have received no attention whatsoever in the scholarship on British Protestant missionaries in India before the twentieth century. Third, scholars of British orientalists and missionaries have paid comparatively little
An earlier version of this article was awarded the De Nobili Research Library Prize for 2012. I am grateful to John Cort, Allen Greenberger, Vinay Lal and Leslie Orr for their comments and suggestions. 2 J. Stevenson, The Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva: Two Works Illustrative of the Jain Religion and Philosophy (London, 1848). The Navatattva Prakarana (Textbook of the Nine Verities) is the proper name of the text Stevenson calls the Nava Tatva Sutra or The Nine Principles of Things.
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Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33.1, 2013, 2051 DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2013.0061 Edinburgh University Press 2013 www.euppublishing.com/jshs

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism attention to Bombay Presidency. Fourth, the nineteenth century was a watershed period in the European study of religions: it was the time when newly discovered religions, such as Jainism, attained recognition as religions and a new taxonomic regime of world religions superseded the four-fold scheme Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Heathenism/Paganism through which Europeans had conventionally parsed the religions of the world.3 Rather than examining the Bombay Scottish missionaries accounts of the Jain religion and interactions with the Jains in isolation, this article seeks to analyse and place the Christian missionary/Jain encounter within the larger nineteenth-century Bombay context in which the Scottish missionaries also interacted with other communities and produced accounts of other religions. One aim of this article, then, is to highlight some of the ways in which Bombay missionaries represented Jains and Jainism as both similar to and distinct from other Indian communities and religions. One of its main arguments is that the state of orientalist scholarship (and specically Jain studies) in the rst half of the nineteenth century, Bombays unparalleled religious diversity and large Jain population, and the particular importance Scottish missionaries placed on discovering the authentic religions of Bombays peoples helped to establish the conditions that led to the early European reication of the religion of the Jains into Jainism and fostered the view that Jainism was an independent religion distinct from Hinduism decades earlier than scholars have previously supposed.4 The Reverend John Stevenson, the Kalpa Sutra and the Svetambara Tradition Born in Stirlingshire in central Scotland, John Stevenson attended the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.5 In 1823 he was ordained and departed Scotland for
3 On the four-fold system of religious classication see P. Harrison, Religion and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 12, 39; T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005); D. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1984), pp. 17, 4556; E. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (2nd edition, London, 1986), p. 18; J. Smith, Religion, Religions, Religious, in M. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998), pp. 27580. 4 For example: Jainism/Jinism was not recognised as an independent religion until 1879, P. Flugel, The Invention of Jainism: A Short History of Jaina Studies, International Journal of Jain Studies, 1 (2005), p. 2. 5 In contrast to John Stevenson, biographic information on his fellow Scotsmen John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell is readily accessible and need not be discussed here. See E. I. Carlyle, Wilson, John (18041875), rev. D. W. Savage, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com, accessed 2 Nov. 2004; J. M. Mitchell, In Western India: Recollections of My Early Missionary Life (Edinburgh, 1899); M. Numark, Translating Religion: British Missionaries and the Politics of Religious Knowledge in Colonial India and Bombay (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006), ch. 1; M. Numark, Translating Dharma: Scottish MissionaryOrientalists and the Politics of Religious Understanding in Nineteenth-Century Bombay, Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (2011), pp. 471500; M. Numark, Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century Bombay: Protestant Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of Indias Bene Israel Community, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (2012), pp. 17641808; L. A. Ritchie, Mitchell, John Murray

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Mitch Numark India as a missionary for the Scottish Missionary Society. He arrived in India on 17 February 1824 ve years before John Wilson and fteen years before John Murray Mitchell and was rst stationed in the southern Konkan before relocating (briey) to Bombay City and then Pune. In 1834 he formally ceased to be a missionary and took a position as an East India Company Church of Scotland chaplain.6 Nebulous health problems and family issues precipitated this change in occupation.7 Despite his change of status, Stevenson remained a true missionary at heart and continued to promote the Christian missionary cause until his departure from India in 1854.8 John Stevenson is one of the most distinguished examples of the highly educated and intellectually inclined Scottish missionary-scholar who laboured in colonial India the destination of choice for the most scholarly nineteenthcentury British applicants for foreign missionary service.9 Reverend Stevenson was particularly celebrated in Bombay for his many contributions to the scholarly study of India.10 In addition to writing a Marathi grammar, a Magadhi grammar, translating the complete Sama Veda into English and twenty-ve hymns of the Rig Veda into English and Marathi and publishing numerous studies in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, he contributed more than twenty scholarly papers to the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.11 Like John Wilson
(18151904), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,www.oxforddnb.com, accessed 23 Sept. 2007; G. Smith, The Life of John Wilson, D.D. F.R.S: For Fifty Years Philanthropist and Scholar in the East (London, 1978); A. F. Walls, Mitchell, John Murray (18151904), in N. M. D. S. Cameron (ed.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Downers Grove, IL, 1993), pp. 5945. 6 C. E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London, 1906), pp. 4023; R. Hunter, History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland in India and Africa (London, 1873), p. 221. 7 Rev. Dr. Stevenson, Oriental Christian Spectator [hereafter OCS], 5, 3rd ser. (1854), pp. 2312. 8 Mitchell, In Western India, p. 50; Rev. Dr. Stevenson, pp. 2312. See also Home and Foreign Missionary Record for the Church of Scotland, Sept. 1854, pp. 2202. Stevenson remained with the established Church of Scotland when the 1843 Disruption occurred in the Scottish Kirk. Hunter, History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland, p. 221. 9 Stuart Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries 17891858: The Social Background, Motives and training of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Abingdon, 1984). Sir Richard Temple, Governor of Bombay, recognised the Scottish missionary penchant for scholarship in an 1879 speech in which he listed the notable contributors who helped to establish the BAS as an institution of considerable prestige and distinction. He listed only three missionaries, all of whom were Scots: John Wilson, John Murray Mitchell, and John Stevenson. See G. K. Tivarekar, Index of the Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay. . . and to the Journals of the Bombay Branch, Royal Asiatic Society. . . With A Historical Sketch of the Society (Bombay, 1886), pp. 246. 10 S. M. Pinge, Yuropeyanacha Marathicha Amyas Va Sayva [European Study and Service to Marathi] (Mumbai, 1960), p. 303; Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic SocietyRev. Dr. Stevenson, OCS, 7, 3rd ser., (1854), pp. 3323. 11 J. Stevenson, The Principles of Murathee Grammar (2nd edition, Bombay, 1843). Stevenson wrote this work with the assistance of Purshoo Ram Punt Godbolee, Dajee Shastree Shooklie, and the Scottish missionary Robert Nesbit. Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 501. Stevenson, Observations on the Marathi Language, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [hereafter JRAS], 7 (1843), pp. 8491; J. Stevenson, On the Intermixture of Buddhism and Brahmanism in the Religion of the Hindus of the Dekkan, JRAS, 7 (1843), pp. 18; J. Stevenson, An Account of the BauddhoVaishnavas, or Vitthal-Bhaktas of the Dakhan, JRAS, 7 (1843), pp. 6473; J. Stevenson, Analysis of the Ganesa Purana, with Special Reference to the History of Buddhism, JRAS, 8 (1846), pp. 31929; J. Stevenson, The Anti-Brahmanical Religion of the Hindus,

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism before him, Stevenson served as president of the BAS. While Stevenson made reference to Jains in many of his articles, his principal contribution to Jain studies were his translations, the rst ones in English, of the Kalpa Sutra and Navatattava Prakarana; the latter, he claimed, was the most popular [Jain] philosophical essay.12 Stevensons Kalpa Sutra has been recognised as the rst translation of a nonphilological Jain text [. . . ] into English.13 The Kalpa Sutra has been described as probably the best known of all Jain texts.14 The orientalist H. T. Colebrooke considered it a work of great authority among the Jainas.15 John Stevenson ascribed more signicance to the Kalpa Sutra; in fact, he declared that it was the Jains most sacred religious work.16 Irrespective of the problems associated with this claim, this much is certain: before the 1870s the Kalpa Sutra was one of the few Jain texts known to Europeans.17 Such a state of affairs may help to explain why orientalist scholars attributed so much signicance to the Kalpa Sutra and why it was one of the four texts that comprised the Jain Sutras chosen for inclusion in Max Mullers The Sacred Books of the East.18 Stevensons translation of the Kalpa Sutra was an achievement for its time that helped to draw attention to Jain literature and thought in European orientalist circles. The Kalpasutram, declared Albrecht Weber, was the rst Jain text which was made known [to Europeans], in 1848, in the very faulty translation of Rev. J. Stevenson.19 It is likely that the peculiarities of Bombay and the particular needs of Christian missionaries prompted Stevenson to undertake such a task. In the introduction to his translation of the Kalpa Sutra, John Stevenson divulged that he enjoyed advantages in the study of the Jain literature on this
JRAS, 8 (1846), pp. 3309; J. Stevenson, An Essay on the Vernacular Literature of the Marathas, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society [hereafter JBBRAS], 1 (18411844), pp. 19; J. Stevenson, The Dowry Received by Kashivan, JBBRAS, 1 (18411844), pp. 525; J. Stevenson, An Essay on the Language of the Aboriginal Hindus, JBBRAS, 1 (18411844), pp. 10326; J. Stevenson, Some Remarks on the Relation that Subsists Between the Jain and Brahmanical Systems of Geography, JBBRAS, 2 (18441847), pp. 4115. For Stevensons Marathi publications, see Pinge, Yuropeyanacha Marathicha Amyas Va Sayva, pp. 294303. 12 Stevenson, The Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. vii. 13 J. Cort, Models of and for the Study of the Jains, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2 (1990), p. 51. 14 J. Cort, Svetambar Murtipujak Jain Scripture in a Performative Context, in J. R. Timm (ed.), Texts in Context Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia (Albany, 1992), pp. 1756. 15 H. T. Colebrooke, Observations on the Sect of the Jains, Asiatic Researches, 9 (1809), p. 302. 16 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. vii. 17 See J. Cort, Svetambar Murtipujak Jain Scripture, pp. 17194; K. Folkert, The Canons of Scripture, in M. Levering (ed.), Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY, 1989), pp. 1709; George Gilmore, New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York, 1910), s. v. Jainism. 18 Paul Dundas attributes the Kalpa Sutras signicance in Hermann Jacobis idea of Jainism to the extraordinary proliferation of manuscripts of the text, far more than for any other Jain work. P. Dundas, The Jains (2nd edition, London, 2002), pp. 656. Kendall Folkert makes a similar argument regarding the inclusion of the Kalpa Sutra in Mullers Sacred Books of the East; Folkert, The Canons of Scripture, p. 175. 19 A. Weber, Webers Sacred Literature of the Jains, trans. H. W. Smith (Bombay 1893), p. 104.

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Mitch Numark side of India [western India], which are unattainable in Bengal.20 What made Bombay Presidency a more advantageous place to study Jain literature than Bengal Presidency? One of Stevensons advantages for studying Jain literature in Bombay may have been his proximity to western Indias Svetambara Jain libraries. But while he almost certainly knew of the existence of at least some of the Jain libraries, there is no evidence that he either visited those libraries or obtained materials from them. In light of the fact that in addition to Magadhi manuscripts his translation of the Kalpa Sutra was also achieved through the use of Gujarati manuscripts,21 the accessibility to Gujarati speakers may have been an advantage for studying Jain literature in western India. One might further suppose that the large (primarily Gujarati-speaking) Jain population living in Bombay City and the surrounding region was another advantage.22 However, neither Stevensons letters to the Scottish Missionary Society nor his publications reveal much interaction with Jains. As far as I am able to discern, he recorded interactions with very few Jains indeed, perhaps as few as one or two: a Jain informant and a yati23 (possibly the same person) who assisted him in his study of Magadhi and his translation of the Kalpa Sutra.24 Considering his groundbreaking contribution to Jain studies, it may seem odd that Stevenson seems to have neither visited Jain sites in western India nor interacted with more Jains. But despite his very limited interaction with living Jains, being stationed in the region of India with the largest concentration of Svetambara (White-clad) Jains surely contributed to his Svetambara inected idea of Jainism. In particular, his contention that the Kalpa Sutra was the Jains most sacred religious work is doubtlessly connected to the fact that whilst he was aware of and referred to Digambara (Sky-clad) Jains the Kalpa Sutra is a Svetambara Jain text recited during Paryusan, the most important annual festival of the Svetambar Jains.25 Put differently, while early scholars of the Jains may have been attracted to Svetambara Jain tradition and its canon out of a concern for the origins of the Jains and the oldest Jain texts, Stevenson doubtless interpreted Jainism in a manner that conformed to a more Svetambara inected notion of the Jain religion at least in part because for the thirty years he lived in India he was based in the region that contained the largest population of Svetambara Jains.26
20 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. xxvi. This comment seems to have been directed at H. T. Colebrooke. 21 J. Wilson, Review of the Present State of Oriental, Antiquarian, and Geographical Research connected with the West of India, JBBRAS, 5, 3rd ser. (1856), p. 508. 22 The 1881 India census showed that Bombay Presidency contained a Jain population over 310 times greater than Bengal Presidency. Lewis Rice, Report on the Mysore Census 1881 (Bangalore, 1884), p. 62. 23 Yati is a term for a non-initiated Svetambara [Jain] cleric, often associated with ritual and worldly knowledge. Dundas, Jains, pp. 66, 280. 24 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. xxv, 138. 25 Cort, Svetambar Murtipujak Jain Scripture, pp. 1767. 26 Cort, Models of and for the Study of the Jains, p. 52.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism Bombays Religious Diversity, Epistemological Imperatives of the Scottish Missionary-Orientalists and the Discovery of Jainism Compared to some of the tribal peoples of western India and Bombays Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Jews and Goankars (Roman Catholics), the Jains received relatively little attention in the Bombay Scottish missionaries publications and in their manuscript letters and reports. But one should not attribute their minimal treatment of the Jains to disinterest. Rather, the comparatively limited attention they devoted to the Jains was most likely partially a consequence of the remarkable heterogeneity of Bombays population and the Scottish missionaries numerous activities and commitments. Although they complained about the time-consuming difculties that Bombays linguistic and religious diversity placed on the Christian missionary, they nevertheless found Bombay City an especially appealing missionary station partly because it was so religiously diverse.27 As John Wilson explained: With regard to Bombay in particular, I can freely say, that when I consider its immense population, the different bodies of which that population is composed [. . . ] I do not know a spot where I could with more willingness, desire to spend, and to be spent for the name of Christ.28 Bombays religious heterogeneity seemed to have facilitated the Scottish missionaries work amongst, and scholarly and polemical writing on, Indias religious minorities and minority religions such as the Jains and Jainism respectively.29 After all, much of their labour and ink was spilled on two of Bombays other minority communities: Parsis and Jews. The Scots considered the Jains as inuential a religious minority as the Parsis and the Baghdadi Jews. They were unquestionably aware that they were not able to give the Jains the attention they thought the Jains merited. As John Wilson explained in a report from the early 1830s, It is much to be regretted that no books intended for their benet have yet been prepared by Christians.30 Sixteen years later he declared that the inuential Jainas have hitherto been far too much overlooked in missionary operations in India.31 This and other observations identifying the Jains as the most enterprising of our native merchants are worthy of attention, since his
27 J. M. Mitchell, Memoir of Rev. Robert Nesbit, Missionary of the Free Church of Scotland, Bombay (London 1858), p. 212; Mitchell, In Western India, p. 23; E. Hewat, Christ in Western India: A Study of the Growth of the Indian Church in Bombay Ciety from 1813, 2nd ed. (Bombay 1853), p. 73; National Library of Scotland [hereafter NLS], MS 8013, J. Wilson to J. Lourie, 4 Oct. 1829. 28 J. Wilson, Extracts from the Journal of the Rev. John Wilson, Scottish Missionary and Philanthropic Register, 12 (1830), pp. 1989. 29 On the study of the Jains as distinct from the study of Jainism and the difference between questions such as What is Jainism? and Who are the Jains and what are their religious beliefs? see Cort, Models of and for the Study of the Jains, pp. 4271. See also Cort, Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (Oxford, 2001). 30 J. Wilson, Report of the Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, OCS, 4 (1833), p. 72. 31 J. Wilson, The Evangelization of India: Considered with Reference to the Duties of the Christian Church at Home and of Its Missionary Agents Abroad (Edinburgh 1849), p. 238.

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Mitch Numark interest in, and work on and amongst, the Parsis was partly undertaken because he deemed them an important group.32 In contrast to John Stevenson, most of the most signicant and long-term Scottish missionaries in Bombay Presidency John Wilson, John Murray Mitchell, James Mitchell and Robert Nesbit seem to have been delighted by their encounters with Jains and took pains to document those encounters. Why, then, did Scottish missionaries like John Wilson and J. M. Mitchell interact with more Jains and record and devote more attention to the practices and beliefs of living Jains than Stevenson? One answer to this question may be that whereas both John Wilson and J. Murray Mitchell labored as Christian missionaries in India for nearly fty years, Stevenson served as a Christian missionary for only ten of his thirty years in India. Geoffrey Oddies recent examination of the differences between orientalist and Protestant missionary ideas of Hinduism and the different sources from which these ideas were formulated may help throw light on why John Wilson and J. Murray Mitchell observed and documented the actual practices and beliefs of contemporary Jains whereas John Stevensons account of the Jains and description of what the Jains believe seems to have been based largely on the Kalpa Sutra and Navatattava Prakarana.33 He argues that Protestant missionaries ideas of Hinduism were based on the sorts of information often ignored by the typical, ostensibly secular, orientalist scholar and that the agenda that propelled the former to study and write about Hinduism was, in important ways, different from that of the latter. He further argues that the goal to spread the Gospel in India predisposed Christian missionaries to: rst, interact with a much broader range of people than the typical Orientalist scholar; second, visit out-of-the-way towns and villages and therefore examine rural Indians conception and practice of their religion; and third, take a serious interest in subaltern and popular notions of Hinduism. For Oddie, these peculiar Christian missionary experiences, goals and inclinations were bound to make Protestant missionary ideas of Hinduism more varied, broader in scope and more contemporaneous than depictions of the Hindu religion drawn from descriptions and comments by orientalists interested primarily or exclusively in ancient brahmanical texts and inclined them toward a greater interest in popular religion and in the ideas and practices of the middle and lower classes and castes than the typical orientalist.34 Not only did John Wilson and other Scottish missionaries interact with Jains in Bombay City and on their preaching tours and research investigations throughout western India, but they also interacted with Jains attending their schools. In
Wilson, Research Connected with the West of India, pp. 5078; J. Wilson, The Parsi Religion: As Contained in the Zand Avasta, and Propounded and Defended by the Zoroastrians of India and Persia, Unfolded, Refuted, and Contrasted with Christianity (Bombay 1843), pp. 267. 33 Like Jainism, Hinduism was, for Europeans, a newly discovered religion disinterred from the vast hodgepodge of beliefs and practices previously denominated Heathenism/Paganism. 34 G. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 17931900 (New Delhi, 2006), pp. 93107.
32

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism 1832, for example, forty-two Jain students attended Scottish missionary schools in Bombay Presidency, which was a greater number than any other class of natives apart from Hindus.35 Three years later, however, Hindu, Muslim, and Roman Catholic students outnumbered Jain students in Scottish missionary schools in Bombay.36 By the end of the 1830s Bene Israel Jewish students would also outnumber Jains.37 As the century progressed Jain students seemed to have represented a dwindling percentage of the student-body attending the schools associated with John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell. Indeed, reports from the 1840s through the 1860s often do not mention any Jains whatsoever attending Church of Scotland and Free Church of Scotland schools.38 Notwithstanding John Stevensons 1848 translations of the Kalpa Sutra and the Navatattava Prakarana, Jainism is the religious system represented in Bombay that was least discussed by the Scottish missionaries. However, that does not mean that Jainism was ignored. Between 1851 and 1875 John Wilson published three lengthy scholarly essays on ancient monuments and sites in western India that he characterised as belonging to the Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina religions.39 He published only one polemical text addressed specically to the Jains, the 1835 Letter to the Jaina Priests of Palitana.40 Other than that publication neither he nor any other Scottish missionary, apart from Stevenson, published anything exclusively on the Jains and Jainism. But the Oriental Christian Spectator a periodical Wilson founded and edited reprinted orientalist scholarship on the Jains and published other Jain-related materials.41 More importantly, descriptions of the Jains and accounts of Jainism, sometimes in the form of a discrete section in a larger work, can be found in a number of J. Wilson and J. M. Mitchells publications.42 In the main, the content and tenor of those accounts, like accounts of the Jains and Jainism written by non-Scottish missionaries in Bombay, anticipate what has been described as the long-standing standard portrait for understanding the Jains that dominates Jain (and Indian) studies [that] was developed in the course of the early
Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, pp. 714. NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 3 Oct. 1835. NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 31 Dec. 1839. Hunter, History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland, pp. 20282. J. Wilson, Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, and other Ancient Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina Remains of Western India, JBBRAS, 3 (1851), p. 37; Wilson, Second Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, and other Ancient Buddhist, Brahmanical and Jaina Remains of Western India, JBBRAS, 4 (1853), pp. 34079; Wilson, Lecture on the Religious Excavations of Western India, Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina (Bombay, 1875), p. 6. 40 A second and third edition of Letter to the Jaina Priests of Palitana was published in 1837 and 1852 respectively. All three editions were published in Gujarati. In 1839 Wilson reported that 1500 copies of this text were printed in Bombay at his own expense, and that he had been almost totally reimbursed for the expense by its sales. Smith, Life of John Wilson, p. 269 n. 1. 41 See, for example, H. T. Colebrooke, Colebrooke on the Jainas and Bauddhas, OCS, 8 (1837), pp. 45561, 54045; J. Glasgow, Jaina Hymn, OCS, 6, 2nd ser. (1845), pp. 214. 42 J. Wilson, The Peculiar Claims of India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize, OCS, 9, 2nd ser. (1848), pp. 266, Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 236238; J. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1876), pp. 4555; Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 6771; J. M. Mitchell, Great Religions of India (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. 204208.
35 36 37 38 39

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Mitch Numark urry of Jain studies in the [the last quarter of the] nineteenth century, primarily by German philologically-oriented scholars.43 Especially before 1848, the nominal treatment of Jainism in the numerous publications of the Bombay Scottish missionaries may have been a result of their uncertainty about and limited knowledge of and access to the Jains sacred texts or so-called scriptures.44 With insufcient access to and knowledge of the Jains sacred texts John Wilson and his Scottish colleagues did not possess what they generally believed was the most authoritative source of information for any species of religion: its scriptures.45 As early as 1833, one can nd Wilson referring to the sutras of the Jains.46 Signicantly, whereas in the period between 1829 and 1848 Wilson frequently referred to Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi scriptures by name, I know of no instance in which he attributed a name to any of the Jain sutras before the 1848 publication of Stevensons Kalpa Sutra. The fact that Wilson did not refer to the Jain sutras by name, however, may merely be symptomatic of his nominal treatment and minimal knowledge of Jainism compared to his more extensive examination and knowledge of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. The comparatively small amount that the Bombay Scottish missionaries wrote about the Jain religion should not be seen in isolation from the contemporaneous European treatment and understanding of Jains and Jainism. Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century Jainism received little attention from Europeans writing on the religions of the East. Surely the minimal attention to Jainism in European discourse on religions was connected to the predominant European belief that the Jain religion was not, in fact, an independent religion, but rather a Buddhist or a Hindu sect.47 This perspective on the identity of the Jains and their religion stemmed from (and was supported by) the work of orientalist scholars such as H. H. Wilson and H. T. Colebrooke whose experience in India was largely limited to a region with very few Jains: Calcutta and the Bengal Presidency.48 Notwithstanding the London-based Oriental Translation Funds 1842 and 1848 publications of Stevensons Sanhita of the Sama Veda and the Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tava, the overall indifference to orientalist scholarship originating in Bombay
43 See, for example, Panchang San [Daily Almanac] (Bombay, 1847), pp. 13641; Mumbaitil Jain Lokanvishani [The Jains of Bombay] Dnyanodaya 7 (1848), pp. 1203; Nirnirale Dharma [Varieties of Dharma/Religion] (Bombay, 1851), pp. 7584; J. Wilson, The Peculiar Claims of India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize, OCS, 9, 2nd ser. (1848), pp. 266, Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 23638; J. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1876), pp. 4555; Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 6771; J. M. Mitchell, Great Religions of India (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. 2048. 44 Although the Bombay Scottish missionaries identied the division of the Jains into Digambaras and Svetambaras, they did not attribute to them different canons of sacred texts. 45 See Numark, Translating Dharma, pp. 47993. 46 Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, p. 72. 47 See Flugel, The Invention of Jainism, p. 2; P. Flugel, A Short History of Jaina Law, International Journal of Jain Studies, 3 (2007), p. 6. 48 For an examination of H. H. Wilson and H. T. Colebrookes accounts of Jainism, see L. Orr, Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains: The South Indian Story, in T. Trautman (ed.), The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New Delhi, 2009), pp. 2757.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism produced during the rst half of the nineteenth century scholarship which would have exposed European scholars to information militating against the idea that the Jains were a sect of Hindus may have further hindered the growth of Jain studies in European orientalist circles. As Leslie Orr has observed: The dominance of the scholarship coming out of Calcutta with Jones, Colebrooke, Wilson, and Prinsep serving successively as the heads of the Asiatic Society of Bengalshaped the course of the study of Indian religious history.49 In John Wilsons speeches to the BAS and in his articles about its contribution to scholarship on India, he both called attention to the Societys relative neglect of the Jains and Jainism and discussed some of the reasons why British scholars should investigate the Jains and their religion. In an 1856 article, for example, he acknowledged Rev. Stevensons contribution to the study of Jainism, but nevertheless conceded that Jain literature had been far too little studied.50 Two decades earlier and twelve years before the appearance of Stevensons Kalpa Sutra Wilson delivered a speech outlining the BASs accomplishments and goals: the acquisition of knowledge about languages, religions, literature and manners and customs of India and its peoples. When discussing the Jains he informed the BAS that its library had acquired some valuable manuscripts that he contended would further disclose the religion of the Jains. However, he noted that the Jain manuscripts the BAS possessed had not been seriously examined. After informing the Society that the Jains had in their possession other manuscripts that would throw much light on the religious history of India in general, he entreated its members to continue to contribute [. . . ] to the exposition of the systems of faith, which have so long exercised their sway in this country. Here one nds Wilson publicly recognising the importance of elucidating the Jain religion, calling for that elucidation to be undertaken and acknowledging how little had been done to that end.51 Rev. Wilsons 1836 acknowledgement of the shortcomings in European knowledge about the religion of the Jains is useful insofar as it helps one to track developments in the British discovery of Jainism over the course of the nineteenth century. It is also important to recognise that in the same 1836 speech, like some of his other speeches to the BAS, he emphasised the importance of Britons obtaining more accurate and comprehensive information on, and therefore a better understanding of, Indias other religions, literatures, languages and peoples. To achieve that goal he urged the Society to expand its manuscript collection and encouraged its members to investigate and translate Buddhist, Parsi, Hindu and Jain texts and manuscripts.52 His call to acquire, examine and translate Jain and Hindu manuscripts was partially realised when John Stevenson translated
Ibid., 277. Wilson, Research Connected with the West of India, p. 508. J. Wilson, Address read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5 (1836), pp. 30412. 52 Ibid.
49 50 51

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Mitch Numark the Sama Veda, Kalpa Sutra and Navatattava Prakarana into English; it was further realised in the 1870s when Georg Buhler and Hermann Jacobi procured and catalogued manuscripts located in western Indias Jain libraries. To grasp fully the signicance and meaning of John Wilsons appeal to the BAS to study Indias religions and communities it is useful to appreciate that he and other Scottish missionaries in Bombay considered the religions, literatures, languages and manners and customs of Indias peoples as interrelated, complementary and overlapping objects of knowledge.53 For Wilson, the importance of attaining a comprehensive understanding of many forms of knowledge related to India was especially relevant to disseminating the Gospel. While divine truth must be propagated with unwavering delity [. . . ] judgement ought to be employed in the mode of its application to those who vary much in their creeds, and differ much in their moral practice. [. . . ] I must hold that there is no little unsuitableness in India, in addressing a Pantheist as a Polytheist, and vice versa: in speaking to a Jaina as to a Brahman [. . . ] and in using theological terms, and general phrases, without any very denite sense of their application by the natives themselves.54 The success of spreading Christianity in India thus depended on the missionaries recognising the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of Indias systems of faith. Since knowledge of Indias religions was considered the key to native society and the native mind, knowledge of Indias systems of faith was the most all-encompassing and important information the colonial government, the BAS and Christian missionaries could obtain. Destitute of a knowledge of these [religious] systems, and the works in which they are embodied, the native character, and the state of native society, will never be sufciently understood, a right key obtained to open the native mind, and all desirable facilities enjoyed for the introduction among the people of a body of rational and equitable law, and the propagation of the Gospel, and the promotion of general education.55 Thus, an understanding of Indias religions would sustain and further achieve what Rev. Wilson and his colleagues considered were essential and inextricably linked
Wilson, Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; Wilson, Evangelization of India; Mitchell, Rev. Robert Nesbit; Mitchell, In Western India; J. Stevenson, An essay on the Points of Similarity and Dissimilarity Between the English and Marathi Languages, in J. T. Molesworth and T. Candy, A Dictionary of English and Marathi, Compiled for the Government of Bombay, (2nd edition, Bombay 1873), pp. 245. 54 Wilson, Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, pp. 31011. 55 Ibid.
53

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism British goals, namely, to rule India more effectively, to improve India and to better propagate the Gospel.56 Although John Wilson and J. Murray Mitchell, in ofcial and unofcial capacities, worked with and for the colonial government, it is clear that whilst stationed in India they considered themselves rst and foremost Christian missionaries.57 Consequently, they were especially insistent that Christian missionaries acquire extensive knowledge of Indias religions. As Wilson declared, the study of the customs, creeds, and the religions of the people of India by missionaries ought to be practised not incidentally but as a duty.58 This duty for the Bombay Scottish missionaries in contrast to the Calcutta-based missionary and Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlander Alexander Duff perforce required the Christian missionary to study both the vernacular and the ancient languages of the peoples of India because the knowledge you thus derive will be found by you to be of immense advantage, as suggesting to you the least offensive and most engaging deportment and address, and the readiest methods of forming and maintaining an acquaintance with those whose welfare you seek. [. . . ] Of not less importance than the matters to which I have now referred, and demanding perhaps still more application is the study of the native religions, embracing if possible, that of the Sanskrit and other dead languages, in which their sacred books are written.59 In essence, understanding the Jain religion and, more broadly, all of Indias religions and understanding Indian vernacular languages and the languages of their sacred books was necessary for the Christian missionary because it would facilitate the conversion of Indians to Christianity by empowering the missionary to make use of non-Christian religious knowledge and Indian languages to devise the most appropriate and effective manner to reach Indians and disseminate the Gospel.60 Bombays large Jain population help to create among the Scottish missionaries the idea that Jainism was a distinct religion. Indeed, more broadly, Bombays religious diversity fostered the Scottish missionaries examination of religions other than Hinduism and Islam and facilitated their study of and interaction with peoples that they considered were neither Hindus nor Muslims. As a
J. Wilson, The Indian Military Revolt Viewed in its Religious Aspects (Bombay, 1857); J. M. Mitchell, Indian Missions; Viewed in Connexion with the Mutiny and Other Recent Events (London, 1857); J. Stevenson, Hindoo Caste: Being a Brief Account of the Origin and Laws of Caste (London, 1858), pp. 278. 57 Numark, Translating Religion, ch. 1; Numark, Translating Dharma, p. 478. 58 J. Wilson, On Preaching to the Hindus, in Report of the General Missionary Conference: Held at Allahabad, 187273 (London, 1873), pp. 202. 59 Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 6671; Numark, Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century Bombay, p. 1783 n. 83. 60 Numark, Translating Dharma, pp. 4778.
56

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Mitch Numark consequence, when John Wilson appealed to Christian missionaries and BAS members to acquire a thorough understanding of Indias religions he emphasised and clearly meant the religions of India, rather than merely Hinduism or any other individual species of religion.61 J. Murray Mitchell likewise argued that Christian missionaries must obtain knowledge of the religions of India.62 Such references to the religions of India should not be construed as an insignicant turn of phrase or as meaningless pluralising because it reected their experience of India. Only in Bombay did one have the virtually unparalleled opportunity to observe and interact with Jews, Parsis, Roman Catholic Goankars and Jains as well as with Hindus and Muslims sometimes, quite literally, at the same time.63 By contrast, Christian missionaries, orientalist scholars and colonial ofcials ensconced in British Indias two other great presidency cities, Calcutta and Madras, simply did not have the same opportunity as Bombay-based missionaries to interact with Jews, Parsis and Jains. Figures from the 1881 census substantiate such a situation: whereas 498,443 Jains, 73,973 Parsis and 9,023 Jews resided in Bombay Presidency (excluding Aden),64 only 1,609 Jains, 156 Parsis and 1,059 Jews resided in Bengal Presidency and 24,962 Jains, 143 Parsis and 30 Jews were recorded as residents of Madras Presidency.65 Bombays large Jain and Parsi populations along with the Scottish missionaries desire and effort to understand the religions of Bombays peoples predisposed Christian missionaries like John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell, at a relatively early date, to recognise, conceptualise and objectivise the religions of Jains and Parsis as two individual religions: Jainism and Zoroastrianism. It is therefore not coincidental that as early as 1840 and 1843 Scottish missionaries in Bombay used the terms Jainism and Zoroastrianism to identify two individual species of religion before these terms had acquired a wide currency and before the Oxford English Dictionarys earliest inclusion of them (1858 and 1854 respectively).66 For example, in an 1840 letter to a correspondent in Scotland J. M. Mitchell used the
61 Wilson, Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; Wilson, The Peculiar Claims of India; Wilson, Evangelization of India. 62 Mitchell, In Western India, p. 23. 63 Goankar was term used by the Bombay Scottish missionaries to refer to descendants of Indians converted to Roman Catholicism and the offspring of Portuguese-Indian unions. In contrast to Calcutta and Madras (cities essentially created by the British), Bombay was a Portuguese colony until 1661. 64 In 1881 Aden, formally a part of Bombay Presidency, had a Jewish population of 2,121. J. Schechtman, The Jews of Aden, Jewish Social Studies, 13 (1951), p. 134. 65 J. S. Keltie (ed.), The Statesmans Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World (London, 1891), p. 122. I thank Dan Shefeld for the reference to this work. 66 See NLS, MS 7532(I), J. M. Mitchell to A. Brunton, 22 July 1840; Wilson, The Parsi Religion, p. 9. See also J. Wilson, The Lands of the Bible Visited and Described in an Extensive Journey Undertaken with Special Reference to the Promotion of Biblical Research and the Advancement of the Cause of Philanthropy, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1847), p. 62; Wilson, Evangelization of India, p. ix; The Conict of Genius and Authority in India. No. III. Buddhism and Jainism, Opposing Brahmanism, OCS, 9, 2nd ser. (1842), pp. 3435.

32

The Scottish Discovery of Jainism noun Jainism numerous times in a manner that unambiguously presented it as an individual religion distinct from and in conict with Hinduism. Every thing [in Gujarat] demonstrates the early extensive prevalence of Jainism over western India; the chief merchants and men of property are generally of that religion; and this fact will partly account for the spirit of doubt, and the unxedness of religious belief, which is much more characteristic of Gujarat and the immediately adjacent tracts than of the Maratha country. Every thing also betokens a hard struggle between Brahmanism and Jainism, in which the latter was nally vanquished. Still it was not extripated, and although no longer ourishing as of old in the sunshine of royal favour, it remains to support a diversity of religious belief, and instill doubts of the truth of Brahmanism. True, error is widely or rather universally prevalent and the Christian missionary must war as resolutely against Jainism, the embodiment of the indel spirit, as against Brahmanism, the embodiment of the superstitious spirit; yet may he not rejoice that the various forms of error are mechanically opposed, and in part mutually destructive?67 A conceptualisation of Jainism as a distinct religion is also indicated by J. M. Mitchells prediction that the Presbyterian Synod of Ulsters newly established mission in Gujarat would eventually introduce another religion (Christianity) into the region that will be an even greater foe to Hinduism than either Jainism or the Mahomedan religion.68 In addition to the Scots, other nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in Bombay were similarly situated to conceptualise and reify the religion of the Jains as Jainism. Take, for example, the 1851 Protestant missionary-produced text Ninirale Dharma (Varieties of Dharma/Religion). As a Marathi-language encyclopedic explication of what was deemed the nine species of the dharma qua religion genus in India Kristi Dharma, Roman Catholic Dharma, Hindu Dharma, Muslamani Dharma, Parsi Dharma, Jain Dharma, Buddha Dharma, Yehudi Dharma, Sheek Lokancha Dharma Ninirale Dharma is an especially interesting text. Another interesting feature of that text, and one related to the English term Jainism, is that whereas all of the religions are rendered into Marathi as manifestations of the dharma taxon the ism sufx in Ninirale Dharmas English-language table of contents is only used for Judaism, Buddhism, and Jainism all the other religions include religion as part of their nomenclature: the Christian Religion, the Roman
67 This quotation is only part of the letter written after a tour of Gujarat. NLS, MS. 7532(I), J. M. Mitchell to A. Brunton, 22 July 1840. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland established its mission in the Gujarats Kathiawar region on John Wilsons recommendation and with his assistance. See Smith, Life of John Wilson, pp. 2948; The Church at Home and Abroad, April 1889, pp. 3402. On the Irish Presbyterian mission in India, see R. Jeffrey, The Indian Mission of the Irish Presbyterian Church (London, 1890). 68 NLS, MS. 7532(I), J. M. Mitchell to A. Brunton, 22 July 1840.

33

Mitch Numark Catholic Religion, the Muhammadan Religion, the Hindu Religion, the Parsi Religion and the Religion of the Sikhs. Christian Proselytization, Anti-Catholic Projections and the Reication of Jainism The Bombay Scottish missionaries method of Christian proselytisation also prompted them to attain a masterly knowledge of Indias religions that further predisposed them to reify (or to build upon or to adopt an earlier or ongoing reication of) the various beliefs, practices and texts of Bombays peoples into discrete and concrete religions such as Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Essentially, their proselytising method aimed at undermining Indian condence in their religions by demonstrating that the Jain, Parsi, Hindu and Muslim religions (as well as Rabbinic Judaism and Roman Catholicism) were, in contradistinction to the Christian religion, largely absurd and false.69 But before this could be achieved the Scots had to possess accurate knowledge of the religions of Bombays manifold peoples. As I have argued elsewhere, obtaining genuine knowledge of a particular religion primarily meant, for them, understanding its putative sacred texts.70 If one bears in mind the nascent state of European knowledge in the rst half of the nineteenth century of what was taken to be the Hindu religion, the Parsi religion and especially the Jain religion, then the acquisition of knowledge about those religions required missionaries like John Wilson and John Stevenson to initiate (or contribute to) the reication of the very religions they sought to know. When compared to European knowledge of religions other than Jainism (including Hinduism and Zoroastrianism) the signicance of the absence of knowledge about the Jain religion in the 1820s through the late 1840s cannot be overemphasised. Before the publication of John Stevensons Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva: Two Works Illustrative of the Jain Religion and Philosophy (1848) no publication existed as a source of information on Jainism equivalent to texts like W. Wards A View of the History, Literature and the Religion of the Hindoos (18151818), A. H. Anquetil-Duperrons Zend-Avesta: Ouvrage de Zorastre (1771) and his Oupnekhat (Upanishads, 1787) or G. Sales Koran: Commonly Called the Alkoran of Mohammed (1734). Nor was there any publication on the Jains equivalent to the numerous other publications and translations about and related to Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and even the Parsi religion. There was simply no comprehensive account of or textbook on Jainism one could consult in the 1820s and 1830s analogous to the publications that existed on a number of other religions including Hinduism and Zoroastrainism. Furthermore, before 1848 Christian missionaries could not consult a published sacred text of
69 70

See Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, ch. 8. Numark, Translating Dharma.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism the Jains, whereas they could consult various published Hindu, Parsi and Muslim sacred texts in English, Sanskrit, Persian, Latin and French. Without such material on the Jain religion how could the Scottish missionaries make sense of the religion of the Jains and consequently expose its errors and contradictions? The project of discovering, understanding, printing and (sometimes) translating the sacred texts of the Hindu religion, the Parsi religion and the Jain religion was necessary before the Bombay Scottish missionaries could participate in an enterprise that Wilfred Cantwell Smith has described broadly as mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematic entity.71 Once the stuff that made Indias religions religions were converted into relatively coherent and conceptually bounded religion-things namely, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism the Scots were able to interrogate more systematically and rigorously what was thought to be the Jain religion, the Parsi religion and the Hindu religion to acquire the type of information their proselytising schema required them to obtain. And once the non-Christian religions were sufciently reied and knowledge of those religions obtained, Scottish missionaries in Bombay could examine the textual traditions of the religions (the supposed depositories of genuine religious knowledge) to unearth their internal contradictions, absurdities, ahistoricity, immorality and overall spuriousness. To put it another way, they had to undertake an investigative procedure that was more or less the same kind of investigative project they entreated their Indian students and interlocutors to undertake: a method of religious inquiry that began, quite literally, with the question, What is the religion? After that question was answered the inquirer could proceed to the second principle question of the Scots scheme of religious investigation: Is the religion true?72 Having reied and transformed the religion of the Hindus, the religion of the Parsis and the religion of the Jains into objective, systematic, bounded and individual religion-things structurally isomorphic to other entities deemed religions denominated Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism, the Bombay Scottish missionaries could procure the material on those newly labeled religions similar to the information that they had already obtained on Roman Catholicism, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam to highlight the ways in which Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism were erroneous, nonsensical, unethical and contrary to the discoveries of science and the truths of nature. Once the erroneous and irrational nature of the non-Christian religions was sufciently proven the Scottish missionaries would introduce and explicate the Bible to their Indian readers, students and discussants and demonstrate the conclusion that the Scots themselves had already held: that real [Protestant] Christianity was the only reasonable, consistent, godly and scientically and historically accurate
W. C. Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, p. 51. J. M. Mitchell, Letters to Indian Youth on the Evidences of the Christian Religion, With a Brief Examination of the Evidences of Hinduism, Parsiism, and Muhammadanism (2nd edition, Bombay 1852), p. 108.
71 72

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Mitch Numark and veriable religion. After such information was disseminated the Scottish missionaries challenged Indians to compare the different religions so as to determine for themselves which species of religion was true. Naive as it may seem, the Scottish missionaries condently believed that if Indians possessed genuine knowledge of Christianity and of non-Christian religions and if they sufciently and sincerely undertook the comparative examination of the religions then they would undoubtedly realise that Christianity was the one true religion and convert to it.73 The Scottish missionaries proselytising method of intellectually undermining the religions of Bombay through the use of non-Christian religious knowledge was deployed against the Jains in what is probably John Wilsons rst discussion of the Jains in print. In an 1833 report he wrote that he had unfolded to the Jains the contradictions of their Sutras [sacred texts], and the unbecoming narratives connected with their Nathas [Tirthankaras ford-makers or Lords].74 Such criticism was essentially the Jain manifestation of the same type of criticism he leveled against Hindu, Parsi and Muslim sacred texts, prophets and deities.75 Among the other ways in which the Bombay Scottish missionaries criticism and representation of Jainism resemble their criticism and representation of Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam concerns the place and function of priests. It is not incidental that the same essential criticism of the place and role of priests in these religions was also for the Scots (and other Protestant missionaries) an especially heinous and intrinsic characteristic of Roman Catholicism. Their understanding of Indian religions was in large part an isomorphic projection and homologous expression of the longstanding Protestant view of Roman Catholicism: it was a recapitulation of long-held Protestant anti-Catholic polemic displaced from the confessional conicts of European history and transplanted onto an Asian context in which the people concerned were not only Roman Catholics, but also Jains, Hindus, Parsis, Jews and Muslims.76 John Wilsons contention that Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Islam promoted the idea that sin could be removed by way of works is but one example of how the Scottish missionaries critique of non-Christian religions mirrored stock Protestant criticism of Roman Catholicism. Thus, when Wilson criticized Jain yatis for claiming that a person could destroy sin, and remove its evil consequences by the performance of good works and when he informed them of the errors of supererogation, he could have just as easily been speaking to Roman Catholic priests about what he, like most other evangelical lowland
For a more detailed examination of the Bombay Scottish missionaries conversion method see Numark, Translating Religion, ch. 3; Numark, Translating Dharma. Some Jains converted to Christianity. See C. Mackenzie, Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana; or Six Years in India, Vol. 2 (2nd edition, London, 1854), p. 328 74 Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, p. 72. 75 Numark, Translating Religion, ch. 3. 76 Numark, Translating Dharma, pp. 47984.
73

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism ministers (and numerous other Protestants since the reformation), believed was an intrinsic and pernicious Roman Catholic doctrine.77 As Wilson declared, the peculiarity of all false religions, and particularly the Hindu, Parsi, Muhammadan, and Papistical, is that they recognise the doctrine of works of supererogation.78

Representations of the Jains and the Jain Religion Some of the ways in which the Bombay Scottish missionaries distinguished the Jains and Jainism from most other peoples and religions reect conventional textbook characteristics ascribed to Jain thought and practice. Thus, whereas the Scots ascribed the idea of ahimsa (non-harming/non-killing) to Jains, Buddhists and Hindus, they thought that Jains practised ahimsa more fastidiously than Hindus and that the principle of ahimsa was more important in the Jain religion than it was to the Hindu religion.79 Regarding the importance of ahimsa to the Jains, John Stevenson declared that mercy to all animated beings was the rst of the ve duties of the Jain religion and killing was greatest of the ve sins.80 In a similar vein, John Murray Mitchell stated that a fundamental maxim of Jainism was not to kill. But whereas J. M. Mitchell argued that Jainism stressed the sacredness of all life more than Buddhism, his older colleague, John Wilson, maintained that Buddhists and Jains displayed equal fervor for the preservation of life, even in its lowest forms.81 Moreover, he considered both Buddhists and Jains as far more ostentatious, in their tenderness to life than the Brahmins. In 1851, Wilson reported that the Jatis, or Jaina priests at the base of Mount Girnar declared that the Jain religion was the daya-dharma, the religion of mercy, which he pointed out was the most common designation of Buddhism on the cave inscriptions.82 Ahimsa was not only a prominent element of Bombay missionaries accounts of Jainism but was also a common topic of discussion between Jains and Scottish missionaries. Take, for instance, John Wilsons 1835 account of his visit to Palitana in Gujarat in which he emphasised how the local Sravakas or laymen of the Jain order pleaded with him not to kill a lamb his party intended to slaughter for food. To avoid giving offence, Wilson set the lamb free. This occurred only after he had informed the Sravakas of the errors of the Jaina system as to the life of brutes. Following his account of the encounter, he described the Jain view of life and non-violence:
J. Wilson, Narrative of a Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India, OCS, 6 (1835), p. 292. J. Wilson, A Memoir of Mrs Margaret Wilson, of the Scottish Mission, Bombay (Edinburgh, 1838), pp. 5423. 79 R. Nesbit, Journal of a Missionary Tour in the Dakhan, OCS, 10 (1839), pp. 114, 210; Wilson, Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India, pp. 701; Wilson, Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, p. 98. 80 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. xxii. 81 Mitchell, Great Religions of India, pp. 2045; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, p. 46. 82 Wilson, Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, pp. 979.
77 78

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Mitch Numark Tenderness to life is what they much attend to. They believe that all life, however, diffused is uncreated; and that the matter in which it is wrapped up is uncreated. They make no distinction between the life of vegetables, brutes, men, and God essentially considered.83 Absent from this description of what is presented as the Jain view of life is any recognition of or reference to an idea often associated with Jain thought: that different living things are differentiated from each other based on the number of senses different categories of beings possess. Here, Wilsons indifference to or ignorance of the ostensible textbook distinction in Jain thought between a singlesense jiva (sentient life/soul) and a ve-sense jiva indicates the possible limitation of his knowledge before the 1848 publication of Stevensons translation of the Navatattava Prakarana. Notably, after 1849 John Wilsons accounts of Jainism and discussions of the Jains became more scholarly and complex. As with the changes in Protestant missionary ideas and depictions of Hinduism that Geoffrey Oddie contends took place between 1850 and 1900, the Bombay Scottish missionaries ideas of Jainism also evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. The factors that Oddie suggests prompted changes in the conception of Hinduism, such as an increase in sources of information and the growth of studies in comparative religion, seem to have also fostered changes in the Scottish missionary account of Jainism.84 Although Wilsons conceptualisation of Jainism at the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century is essentially the same as his earlier conceptualisation, differences do exist that coincide with, reect and express developments in Jain studies. Take, for example, Wilsons 1876 essay on the Jains entitled The Jainas and their Yatis or Jatis (hereafter, Jainas), which appeared in his posthumously published Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency. Whereas his earlier accounts of the Jains and interpretations of Jainism seem to have been based primarily on information he obtained from sundry living (Svetambara) Jains throughout western India and the work of scholars such as William Erskine and James Tod, his 1876 essay, by contrast, is not only more scholarly, but it is also informed by John Stevenson, Albrecht Weber and Christian Lassens research on the Jain religion published between 1848 and 1875.85 There are two particularly notable ways in which Wilsons 1876 Jainas differs from his earlier writings. First, his 1876 work reveals a more nuanced account of how the Jains, at least theoretically, conceptualised jiva/jivas than his early exposition of the topic. Whereas in 1835 he claimed that the Jains make no distinction between the life of vegetables, brutes, men, and God essentially considered, his 1876 publication qualied and fruitfully complicated his earlier account: They make no essential distinction between life in vegetables,
83 84 85

Wilson, Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India, p. 291. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, p. 231. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, pp. 4555.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism worms, insects, shes, birds, serpents, beasts, men, and superior beings, essentially considered, though they have the vital principle in different degrees.86 This more complex interpretation may have come from reading of Stevensons translation of the Navatattava Prakarana a text that discusses the different classes of animated beings and the different number of senses those different kinds of beings possess.87 The place of priests in Jainism and amongst the Jains represents more signicant differences between John Wilson and his Scottish missionary colleagues early writing and Wilsons 1876 Jainas. Before the 1860s the Bombay Scottish missionaries were of the opinion that priests occupied a place in the Jain religion, just as they believed that priests occupied a place in virtually all other nonChristian religions, in practice if not in theory. To the Scottish missionaries the priests of the Jains were primarily the yatis. Attributing priests to the Jain tradition and rendering yatis as Jain priests should not be dismissed as an innocuous application of an inappropriate and anachronistic vocabulary and interpretive scheme to the Jain tradition. Protestant missionaries in nineteenthcentury Bombay, especially but not exclusively Scotsmen, steeped in centuries of virulent anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism, ascribed to the purported priests of various non-Christian religions Muslim mullahs, Jewish rabbis, Hindu brahmins, Parsi dasturs and mobeds and Jain yatis some of the same negative attributes Protestants had attributed to Roman Catholic priests since the sixteenth century.88 In Wilsons 1876 Jainas, however, yatis are no longer characterised as or even denominated Jain priests. In fact, in an astonishing volte-face, he contended that the priest properly so called does not nd a place in the system of either Bauddhas or Jains. His criticism of Stevensons rendering of the Magadhi Namo Ayarianam and the Sanskrit Namaskarosta Acharyebhyah of the Jaina Confession or Creed as those who regulate our religious services further conveys his revised view of the role of priests in the Jain tradition, especially insofar as he characterised Stevensons translation as putting a Brahmaical [priestly] rather than a Jaina interpretation on the designation [acharya].89 Instead of interpolating a priestly or Brahmanical element into the English translation of the Jaina Confession or Creed, Wilson rendered Namaskarosta Acharyebhyah as: Let there be salutation to the Observers of the conduct prescribed. He buttressed and legitimised the accuracy of his translation by pointing out that the most zealous propagator of Jainism, the Samvegi Saduji Shricharitra Pradhana Swami, repudiated Stevensons translation and agreed with his own.90
86 Wilson, Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India, p. 291; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49. 87 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. 11519. 88 See Numark, Translating Dharma, pp. 47990. 89 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. 21; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 47. 90 Ibid., pp. 478. I thank John Cort for attempting to identify the Samvegi Saduji Shricharitra Pradhana Swami and for consulting Peter Flugel and Paul Dundas. The Samvegi Saduji Shricharitra Pradhana Swami is probably a yati title rather than a mendicant name, despite the samvegi designation.

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Mitch Numark Irrespective of Wilsons assertion that the Jains acknowledge the existence of the Hindu gods, especially the more ancient of them, though they place them in a subordinate, and to a certain extent contemptible, position, another way in which the Scottish missionaries distinguished the Jains and Jainism from Bombays other communities and religions was their contention that the Jain religion repudiated the notions of a creator and a providential deity interceding in the world and therefore promoted both a practical and an actual atheism.91 The deliberate doctrine of the Jains, Wilson declared, was Ishwarnasti (Sanskrit) or Ishwarnathi (Gujarati) there is no operative Lord.92 While John Wilson characterised Jainism as essentially atheistic and encountered Jains who repudiated the notion of a providential deity and therefore expressed an opinion consistent with his idea of the Jain religion, he also encountered individual Jains who told him that they did indeed believe in the existence of a providential deity. He described one Jain student as rejecting the atheism attributed to Jainism by repeatedly declaring: Parame shvara che, Parame shvara che [sic]! There is a Supreme Lord, there is a Supreme Lord!93 This student was not the only Jain that the Bombay Scottish missionaries encountered who expressed a belief purportedly at odds with the doctrines of Jainism. At Sonai in Gujarat, for instance, Wilson encountered Jains who he observed allowed the existence of one God in a manner inconsistent with the tenets of their sect.94 In 1864, a benevolent Jaina banker nancially ruined as a result of mad speculation told Wilson: I do believe in Ishvara [God], though I have been taught otherwise.95 For J. M. Mitchell, Jain laymen had transformed the twentyfourth Tirthankara and contemporary of the Buddha, Vardhamana Mahavira, into a kind of deity which was certainly an immense departure from the original [Jain] tenet.96 The Jains, it seemed, like stubborn actors modifying their lines, were not consistently following the script the Scottish missionaries believed Jains as ostensible adherents of the Jain religion were supposed to follow. Such a state of affairs parallels the disjuncture the same missionaries observed between the supposed authentic doctrines of Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity and the actual beliefs and practices of Bombays Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Jews and nominal Christians.97
91 Ibid., p. 46; Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, p. 72; J. Wilson, The God of the Bible and the Gods of the Shastras, OCS, 5, 3rd ser. (1854), pp. 2415; G. Smith, Life of John Wilson, p. 499; Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 2335; Mitchell, Great Religions of India, pp. 1856. 92 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49; Wilson, God of the Bible and Gods of the Shastras, p. 242. 93 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49. 94 Wilson quoted in G. Smith, Life of John Wilson, pp. 1489. 95 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49. 96 Mitchell, Great Religions of India, p. 207. Vardhamana, a contemporary of the Buddha, is often known by his epithet Mahavira (Great Soul). The Kalpa Sutra includes an extensive biography of Mahavira as well as shorter accounts of other tirthankaras, including the rst (Rishabha) and twentythird (Parsvanatha). 97 Numark, Translating Dharma.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism Jain criticism of Hindu texts and practices and assent to Christian condemnation of Hinduism are other traits that distinguish the Jains from most other Indian communities in the records of the Bombay Scottish missionaries. For example, in an 1833 report John Wilson remarked: When the Jainas have rst an opportunity of hearing a discourse, they generally express their assent to a great deal of what is said. They are delighted to nd that we have no condence in the Puranas, and that we disapprove of the prevailing religious practices of the Hindus.98 Over the following decades numerous similar statements (ostensibly depicting the Jain perspective on the Hindu religion) can be found. For instance, at a disputation held in the court of Raja Rao Desalji II of Kutch a Jaina priest joined Rev. Wilson in unfolding the errors of the Vedas and Puranas. After describing how both he and the Jain priest had criticised Hindu texts he remarked that the Jains universally oppose the idea of the inspiration of the Hindu sacred writings.99 Similarly, following a visit to a village near Pune the Scottish missionary James Mitchell reported that the local Jain merchants seemed to have enjoyed his exposures of the folly of Hinduism.100 Likewise, at Aitawada, Robert Nesbit had a discussion with several Jains who had heard that their religion and ours [Christianity] agreed in many important points. Although Nesbit informed them that they, like Hindus, professed a false religion, he nevertheless recorded how he was struck with the great force of reason and ridicule with which they ran down the Brahminical scriptures.101 There are a number of possible reasons why Scottish missionaries in Bombay especially during the rst half of the nineteenth century recorded, with notable alacrity, Jains criticising Hindu texts while rarely recording other Indians (apart from Christian converts) criticising Hinduism. First, the Scots may have been merely documenting a common Jain perspective of Hindu texts like the Vedas. Whether or not these nineteenth-century Jains encountered by the Scots had actual knowledge of the works they criticised at least some Jains did not value the Brahmanical scriptures and therefore had no compunction about voicing their disapproval of them. The fact that many of the Jains they recorded expressing such a view were not identied as yatis, acaryas or priests suggests that that perspective was not conned to the Jains they identied as belonging to the Jain clergy. Another explanation for why the Bombay Scottish missionaries documented Jains criticising the Brahmanical scriptures not only concerns their impression of the acrimonious relations between Jains and Brahmins of their day but also
Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, p. 72. Wilson, Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India, p. 329. J. Mitchell, Journal of a Visit Made to Some Villages in the Neighbourhood of Puna, OCS, 7 (1836), p. 47. 101 R. Nesbit, Journal of a Missionary Tour in the Maratha Country, OCS, 1, 2nd ser. (1840), p. 76.
98 99 100

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Mitch Numark their understanding of the relations between Jains and Hindus in the past. One of the rst texts John Wilson read that discussed the past relationship between Jains and Hindus was John Taylors 1812 translation of the Advaita Vedantan Krishna Misras eleventh-century allegorical drama the Prabodha Chandrodaya.102 Several different worldviews appear in the Prabodha Chandrodaya as characters who propound and debate their particular philosophies, including a Jain denominated Digamber. Some historians of pre-modern India have used the drama as evidence of the acrimony which certainly existed between the followers of different sects in early medieval India.103 Taylors 1812 English translation certainly lends itself to such a reading and I see no reason why Wilson would not have interpreted the Prabodha Chandrodaya as an illustration of the historical conict between the Jain and Hindu religious systems especially because such a conict tallied with his experience of witnessing Jains criticising Hinduism and his awareness of the hostility that purportedly existed between Jains and Hindus.104 Reading such a text surely reinforced his belief that Jains and Hindus adhered to different religions. Moreover, by using the content of the Vedas against individuals who valued the Vedas, the Jain character in the Prabodha Chandrodaya criticised what was taken to be the Hindu religion in a manner that resembled the Scottish missionaries criticism of Hinduism.105 The Jain effort to extend their faith was another characteristic of the Jains that set them apart from most Bombay religious communities. John Wilson explicitly differentiated the Jains in this regard when he wrote that the Jains have systems of proselytism, unknown almost to other classes of natives, very actively at work.106 The base of Mount Girnar in Gujarat was one place where he observed Jains seeking to make converts. According to Wilson, the Jains effort to extend their faith was at least as old as the eleventh or twelfth centuries.107 J. M. Mitchell professed a similar opinion and described Jainism as a proselytising and universal religion.108 Whatever the extent to which nineteenth-century Jains actually sought to convert non-Jains to Jainism (what exactly such conversions would entail and mean is another matter), the proselytising effort the Bombay Scottish missionaries ascribed to the Jains is especially worthy of attention because is was a trait they rarely ascribed to other Bombay religious communities. In the introduction to his Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva John Stevenson discussed the confessional amongst the Jains and the necessity that exists of confessing at least once a year to a priest, and obtaining from him ghostly absolution, which is a
102 J. Wilson, An Exposure of the Hindu Religion (Bombay, 1832), p. 35n; J. Taylor, Prabodh Chandrodaya, or The Moon of Intellect; An Allegorical Drama (London, 1812). 103 See, for example, B. Chattopadhyaya, Studying Early India: Archaeology, Texts, and Historical Issues (Delhi, 2003), p. 161. Whether or not such a conclusion is justied is another matter. 104 See, for example, Instance of Brahmanical Intolerance OCS, 1, 2nd ser. (1840), pp. 4812. 105 Taylor, Prabodh Chandrodaya, p. 40n. 106 Wilson, Research Connected with the West of India, p. 508. 107 Wilson, Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, pp. 8398. 108 Mitchell, Great Religions of India, p. 206.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism practice neither he nor his Scottish missionary colleagues attributed to any other Bombay religious community other than Roman Catholics. Stevenson himself recorded his astonishment at discovering that the confessional was an element of the Jain creed.109 Here Stevenson is referring to pratikramana.110 Notwithstanding its place of in the Jain tradition, Stevensons translation and understanding of pratikramana is one example of how the Bombay Scottish missionaries tended to conceptualise non-Christian religions through an interpretive framework shaped by Christianitys concerns, controversies and history.111 The Relationship of the Jains to Buddhism and Hinduism How did the Bombay Scottish missionaries conceive of the relationship between Jains and Buddhists and understand the Jain connection to Buddhism? Apart from a single possible instance (discussed below) in which John Wilson referred to Jains as Buddhists without the qualication of sect or seceder there is no evidence that either he or his Scottish missionary colleagues identied the Jains as Buddhists without qualication. Nor would it be correct to say that they reduced the religion of the Jains to Buddhism rather than denominating it as a distinctive, albeit related, species of religion. That is not to say that there was no confusion about the relationship between the Buddhist and the Jain religions. On the contrary, considering that Bombay missionaries and other Europeans discerned many similarities between the Jain and the Buddhist religions, and considering that nineteenth-century Europeans were in the throes of a conceptual revolution in the way in which they imagined and classied the religions of the world, it should hardly be surprising that considerable uncertainty existed about the exact nature of the connection between Buddhism and Jainism. The Bombay Scottish missionaries view of the connection between Buddhism and Jainism especially in terms of their origins was expressed in complex and variable ways. In his 1848 Kalpa Sutra John Stevenson contended that the idea that the Jain religion was merely a corruption of the Buddhistical religion was mistaken because Mahavira was the Buddhas preceptor and the latter was the favourite pupil of the former.112 Recently, Torkel Brekke has claimed that Stevenson subscribed to the theory that Buddhism was an offshoot of Jainism.113 While it is true that Stevenson made such an argument in his 1848 publication, his other publications support different positions. In an 1843 publication, for example, he conveyed uncertainty about the relationship between Jainism and Buddhism and their chronological priority: the sect of the Jains, who are but a branch derived from the parent stem [Buddhism], or themselves the stem
Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. xxiiixxiv. Kristi Wiley describes pratikramana vis--vis the Jains as confession of, and repentance for, faults that one has committed or for infractions of ones vows. Wiley, Historical Dictionary of Jainism, p. 170. 111 See Numark, Translating Dharma. 112 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. ixxvi. 113 T. Brekke, Makers of Modern Indian Religion in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), p. 133.
109 110

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Mitch Numark from which Buddhism sprung.114 Whatever may have been his position on the chronology, it is important to keep in mind that in his 1848 Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva he treated the religion of the Jains as a religion that was closely connected to but ultimately distinct from Buddhism.115 Like Stevenson, the manner in which John Wilson explicitly described the connection between Jainism and Buddhism was somewhat ambiguous and changed over time. Unlike Stevenson, however, he seems never to have argued that Buddhism derived from Jainism. On the contrary, from the 1840s through the 1870s Wilson invariably asserted that Buddhism came into existence before Jainism an interpretation advanced earlier in the century by William Erskine (Wilsons friend, orientalist, East India Company ofcial and fellow Bombaybased Scot) and a view, which he noted, learned Jainas often acknowledged was the case.116 All in all, Wilson consistently posited Jainisms close connection and similarity to, but not complete identity with, Buddhism. The change in Wilsons opinion of the relationship between Jainism and Buddhism is relatively minor and subtle but nevertheless evident in the changed vocabulary he used to describe that connection. In the 1840s he referred to Jains as Buddhist sectaries.117 Inasmuch as the meaning of sect/sectaries is ambiguous and has changed over time, and because it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that the term sect began to be conned to the matters pertaining to the internal divisions of a single religion, one should not necessarily interpret Wilsons references to Jains as Buddhist sectaries as meaning that he considered Jains as nothing more than Buddhists whose beliefs and practices diverged from the orthodox or standard form of their religion (Buddhism).118 By identifying Jains as Buddhist sectaries he may have meant that the religion of the Jains was a variant or expression of Buddhism. But by denominating the religion of the Jains as the religion of the Jains and Jainism, rather than Buddhism or the Buddhist religion, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he merely sought to convey the idea that the religion of the Jains was similar to Buddhism (and may have had Buddhist origins or inuences), which is qualitatively different from saying that Jainism was nothing other than an expression of Buddhism. Be that as it may, in the 1850s one nds the beginning of a change in the vocabulary Wilson deployed to describe the Jain connection to Buddhism: he began to describe the Jains as Buddhist Seceders.119 More to the point, in an 1876 essay on the Jains he did not identify Jains as Buddhists or even a sect of Buddhists. Instead, he not only treated
114 Stevenson, Intermixture of Buddhism and Brahmanism in the Religion of the Hindus, pp. 45. 115 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. viixxviii. 116 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 47; J. Wilson, Brief Memorial of the Literary Researches of the Late William Erskine, Esq., JBBRAS, 4 (1853), p. 281. 117 Wilson, India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize, p. 57; Wilson, Evangelization of India, p. 236. 118 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, p. 58. 119 J. Wilson, History of the Suppression of Infanticide in Western India Under the Government of Bombay (Bombay, 1855), p. 54; J. Wilson, Indian Caste, Vol. 1 (reprint of 1877 edition, New Delhi, 1976), p. 315.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism Jainism as a distinctive religion but he also explicitly postulated nothing more than a strong connection between Jains and Buddhists, especially in their origin, tenets, and aspirations. Furthermore, in that same text he applied the term sect not to the Jains in relation to Buddhism, but rather to indicate internal divisions within Jainism, such as the Svetambara sect and the Digambara sect.120 Appreciating how the Scottish missionaries understood Buddhism and Jainism with reference to and in the context of how they understood other religions can elucidate the ways in which they conceptualised Buddhism and Jainism as distinct and connected religions. Similar to Bombay-based orientalist scholars who were not missionaries, John Wilson certainly posited a close connection between Jainism and Buddhism.121 The manner in which he organised individual publications, however, gives the impression that he also envisaged Jainism and Buddhism, qua religions, as almost as distinct from each other taxonomically as they were from the religions denominated Hinduism, Muhammadanism and Zoroastrianism. In the Evangelization of India, for example, he discussed various systems of religious error represented in India. Each individual system is treated separately in numbered and discrete sections: (1) Muhammadanism, (2) Zoroastrianism, (3) Buddhism, (4) Jainism and (5) Brahmanism or Hinduism.122 Such an organisational structure implies a conceptual scheme in which all of the individual systems of religious error were comprehended in fundamental ways as both the same and different: they were the same in that they all shared something in common, namely, that they were all individual systems of religious error, but they were also all different in that they possessed enough distinctive characteristics to justify the classication of them as separate and exclusive systems. If the religion of the Jainas was Buddhism and if the Jains were merely a Buddhist sect, why would Jains be given a distinct section when there existed a structurally equivalent section on Buddhists? By the same token, if Jains were Buddhists why would Wilson in three different publications characterise some ancient sites in India as belonging to the Buddhist, Brahmanical and Jaina religions?123 Here it would be useful to explore a seeming incongruity in the historical records of John Wilson that elucidates his view on the identity of Jains. In an 1829 letter, which includes what may have been his earliest list of Bombay communities, Wilson noted the existence of Buddhists in Bombay City while making no mention of Jains.124 His Bombay community taxonomies from the 1830s, on the other hand, record Jains in Bombay City, Bombay Presidency and his Scottish mission schools, but no Buddhists. In fact, I know of no instance subsequent to 1829 in which Wilson claimed that Buddhists (as such) were living
Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, pp. 4555. See Orr, Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains, pp. 2779. Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. ix, 22647. Wilson, Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, p. 37; Wilson, Second Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries; Wilson, Religious Excavations of Western India, p. 6. 124 Smith, Life of John Wilson, p. 54.
120 121 122 123

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Mitch Numark in Bombay, except perhaps on those few occasions when he identied the Jains not only as Jains but also as a Buddhist sect. It is signicant, however, that in at least one of the publications in which he identied Jains as a Buddhist sect he also maintained that: (1) there were no living representatives [of Buddhism] in our neighbourhood [western India] and (2) the principal habitat of the Jains was now in Western India.125 The most plausible explanation for these seeming discrepancies is simple: his experience in Bombay as a Christian missionary, Orientalist scholar and ethnographer led him to revise the vocabulary by which he classied Bombays communities and religions. It is apropos that his 1829 letter recording Buddhist residents in Bombay City but no Jains was written when he was in India not longer than eleven months; and since he spent his rst nine months in the southern Konkan a region with few Jains the letter was doubtlessly composed before he had much, if any, contact with Jains and little experience living in Bombay City. Consequently, it is reasonable to conclude that the 1829 letter was written before Wilson began to differentiate Jains from Buddhists and that the Buddhists he claimed were resident in the Bombay were people he would later identify as Jain. Not only did the Bombay Scottish missionaries conceptualise the religion of the Jains as distinct from Buddhism, but they also unambiguously posited the the Jain religion as an independent religion distinct from Hinduism. Their experience of witnessing nineteenth-century Jains criticising and ridiculing the Brahmanical scriptures surely buttressed (and probably informed) their view that the Jains were not Hindus. Notwithstanding the fact that Wilson was aware that Jains often maintained an identity as Vaishyas and Kshatriyas and that Brahmins sometimes functioned as Jain subordinate ministers, apart from possibly one single uncharacteristic and very problematic reference in the records of the Bombay Scottish missionaries, I know of no instance in which they referred to the religion of the Jains as Hinduism or the Hindu religion.126 The single reference that may prima facie seem to indicate that Wilson considered Jains as Hindus comes from his 1876 Jainas which contains a reference to Jains as other Hindus. When this single reference is examined and situated within its specic context, however, one realises that Wilson did not mean to say that the Jains were Hindus and that the religion of the Jains was Hinduism. The statement in question was made in the context of and in specic reference to the 1873 Bombay High Court case of Bhagvandas Tejmal v. Rajmal which was a succession dispute within a Marwari Jaina Agraval family involving a widows right of adoption wherein Chief Justice Sir Michael R. Westropp determined that Jains were subject to Hindu inheritance law.127 Similar to his juridical function in the 1862 Maharaj Libel Case in Tejmal v. Rajmal Reverend Wilson acted
Wilson, Research Connected with the West of India, pp. 50710. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, p. 46. Flugel, A Short History of Jaina Law, pp. 57; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, p. 46n.
125 126 127

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism as the Bombay High Courts expert witness on Jain and Hindu literature, law and religion.128 Germane to our discussion is that while he testied that Jains derive their origin from Hindus and retain the same laws of succession they nevertheless diverged from Hindus in religion.129 One fruitful means to unearth the ways in which the Bombay Scottish missionaries conceptualised the Jains as a religious community and Jainism as a religion (especially in relationship to Hindus and Hinduism) is to examine documents in which they discuss the Jains and Jainism and other religious communities and religions. Such an examination reveals no evidence that the Scottish missionaries discussed or treated the Jains as Hindus or regarded the religion of the Jains as Hinduism. Instead, they examine and treat Jains and Jainism in relation to Hindus and Hinduism in essentially the same manner in which they examine and treat Parsis and Zororastrianism and Muslims and Islam in relation to Hindus and Hinduism. In their publications Jains and Jainism are usually examined in their own sections or subsections of a particular text entitled or exclusively focused on Jains or the Jain religion when those very texts contain other parts, sections and chapters entitled or exclusively focused on Hindus and the Hindu religion.130 Such an organisational structure ipso facto suggests that they neither believed that Jains were Hindus nor that the religion of the Jains was Hinduism. Not only does the structural organisation of their publications indicate their opinion that Jains were not Hindus but it also suggests that the Scottish missionaries perceived the same conceptual and differential distance between Jains and Hinduism as they regarded as existed between Parsis and Hinduism and Muslims and Hinduism. In addition, Wilsons reports from the 1830s, which contained descriptions and enumerations of Bombays religious communities denominated individual classes of natives attending Scottish mission schools, leaves no doubt that he identied the Jains as a individual group distinct from Hindus. In those reports he invariably classied Jains as a religious community separate from the much larger religious community labeled Hindus. His 1832 report begins with the following sentence: In discharging the duties of my ofce, I endeavour, as far as circumstances will permit, to direct my attention to all classes of the native community; and Hindus, Mussulmans, Parsis, Jainas, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Converts, share in my Ministry.131 Most of the rest of the report is divided into individual sections addressing a distinct religious community that begins with the name of the particular
See Numark, Translating Dharma, p. 477. C. Jackson (ed.), Bombay High Court Reports, Vol. X: Reports of Cases Decided in the High Court of Bombay: 1873 (Bombay, 1874), pp. 2567. 130 See Wilson, India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize; Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 22651; Wilson, Research Connected with the West of India; Mitchell, Great Religions of India. 131 Wilson, Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832, pp. 714.
128 129

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Mitch Numark community examined. The report is an example of the manner in which the Jains are represented and classied as no more Hindu than Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Parsis. Conclusion In examining Scottish missionaries representations of the Jains and ideas of Jainism, this article has sought to enrich and complicate our understanding of the European discovery of Jainism, British depictions of the Jains and the activities and ideas of Scottish missionaries in India. Scholarship on the ways in which nineteenth-century Europeans conceptualised or imagined Jainism (and interacted with the Jains) has only scratched the surface.132 For the most part, extant scholarship on the topic begins in the early nineteenth century with H. T. Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson before leaping ahead to the late 1870s and the work of the German scholar Herman Jacobi. As a result, the understanding of the British image of the Jains and conception of the religion of the Jains has been largely the image and conception propounded by what Leslie Orr has called the Calcutta school of Orientalism.133 Such an interpretation lends credence to the claim that the publication of Jacobis 1879 Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu134 fostered a paradigmatic shift in how Europeans conceptualised the religion of the Jains namely, the Jains were not a Buddhist or a Hindu sect but a distinct religious community professing its own distinctive, recognisable and ancient religion (Jainism).135 Hermann Jacobis identication of the nigganthas as Jains certainly helped to reinforce and to disseminate the notion that Jainism was a religion distinct from Buddhism and Hinduism. The claim that Jacobis 1879 work inaugurated the idea that the Jains were neither a Buddhist nor Hindu sect and that the Jain religion was not heretofore deemed a separate independent religion is, however, negated by a close examination of the historical record. As I have shown, Bombay-based Protestant missionaries such as John Wilson did not need to wait for Herman Jacobis 1879 Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu to conceptualise and represent the Jains as neither Hindus nor Buddhists nor to consider the religion of the Jains as a religion that was neither Hinduism nor Buddhism. The historical record testies to the fact that one did not need to identify the nigganthas with the Jains to posit Jainism as a distinct religion.
132 J. Cort, Introduction: Contested Jain Identities of Self and Other, in J. Cort (ed.), Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History (Albany, NY, 1998); Dundas, The Jains, p. 112; A. Luithle-Hardenberg, The Jaina and the British: Jaina Community in the 19th and Early 20th Century, Position paper for the workshop: The Jaina and the British: Collaboration and Conict, Concealment and Contribution during the 19th and Early 20th Century, University of Tubingen, 1920 Feb., 2010; Orr, Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains. 133 Orr, Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains. 134 H. Jacobi, The Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu (Leipzig, 1879). For a more recent translation of the Kalpa Sutra, see K. Lalwani, Kalpa Sutra of Bhadrabahu Svami (reprint of 1979 edition, Delhi, 1999). 135 A position encapsulated in Flugel, Invention of Jainism, p. 2.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism Why did Scottish missionaries in nineteenth-century Bombay conceptualise the Jains as a distinct religious community and Jainism as an individual religion before the work of H. Jacobi and in contradistinction to the earlier scholarship on the Jains coming out of Calcutta? In this article I have proposed several interrelated and overlapping reasons. First, Bombays Jain population dwarfed the Jain population in British Indias other regions. As mentioned, the 1881 census noted that Bombays Jain population was over 310 times greater than that of Bengal. That fact alone meant that the Jains received a kind of consideration in Bombay that they did not receive in Bengal a situation the historical record conrms. Second, partly as consequence of Bombays large Jain population, Jain manuscripts were more available in Bombay than they were in Bengal. This probably produced the advantage for studying the Jain religion that John Stevenson declared he attained by being based in Bombay rather than in Bengal. While it is uncertain whether Stevensons translations of the Kalpa Sutra and the Navatattava Prakarana were undertaken as a result of John Wilsons 1836 appeal to the BAS to translate Jain manuscripts it certainly accomplished the task he called upon the Societys members to carry out. The translation and publication of the Kalpa Sutra, moreover, meant that at least by 1848 the Scottish missionaries were able for the rst time to examine in printed form (and in the English language) not only what they considered was a Jain sacred text but also, more signicantly, the very scripture Stevenson claimed was the Jains most sacred religious work. As the Scots were already in possession of some of the most sacred religious work of Bombays other religious communities, the publication of Stevensons translation of the Kalpa Sutra helped to foster and reinforce the notion that the Jain religion, as an individual species of religion, was equivalent to and kindred with other religions. Third, the peculiar method through which the Bombay Scottish missionaries sought to convert Indians necessitated obtaining an understanding of the manifold religions of Bombays heterogeneous population, which meant that they had an urgent and singular motivation to understand the religion of the Jains that the non-missionary scholars associated with the Calcutta school of orientalism did not share. As a result, despite some of the confusion and inconsistency that inevitably arises when a new conceptual scheme (for parsing the religions of the world) supersedes an older scheme, Scottish missionaries in Bombay reied the religion of the Jains into Jainism and began to conceptualise, write about and treat the Jain religion as an independent religion distinct from Hinduism and even Buddhism almost fty years before the appearance of Jacobis 1879 Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu. Fourth, we know that by 1832 John Wilson was aware that premodern Indian texts seemed to show that the acrimony he observed in India between (at least some) Jains and Hindus as to their respective religions existed in the Indian past too. Fifth, Jains themselves informed the Scottish missionaries that their religion was different from the religion of the Hindus and in the presence of the Scots publicly rejected and condemned Hinduism.

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Mitch Numark My argument that Scottish missionaries in Bombay were among the earliest Britons to conceptualise the Jains as a distinct religious community and Jainism as a separate individual religion is grounded in an examination of archival and published sources that have not previously been scoured for information related to the Jains. That is a conclusion not only based on their specic accounts of the Jains and Jainism but also on their accounts of what they considered Bombays other religious communities and Indias other religions. As I have argued elsewhere, only by a comparative examination of the ways in which particular individuals wrote about and conceptualised several religions can one fully understand how they conceptualised an individual species of religion.136 Max Muller may not have practised what he preached but he was certainly on to something when he declared: He who knows one, knows none.137 In this regard it is both convenient and instructive that Scottish missionary sources discuss the Jains and Jainism along with a number of other religious communities and religions. An examination of these and other sources suggests that by 1832 Scottish missionaries in Bombay began to apprehend Jains as non-Hindus and Jainism as a religion different from Hinduism and even Buddhism. An examination of the context or organisational structure of a specic source can bring greater meaning to the specic source (and subject of investigation) and enable one to disinter signications embedded within the sources organisational structure. As John Wilsons 1835 report includes a schedule, which contains information in the form of grids and lists on Bombay Presidencys Scottish mission schools, it is one specimen of evidence that can illustrate: (1) how the form of a particular document can elucidate the documents signication greater than the sum of its separate informational units of content and (2) how Jains and Jainism were understood in relationship to Bombays other religious communities and religions.138 In the schedule we nd the following list of students: Protestants 8 Roman Catholics 40 Jews 8 Muhammandans 30 Parsis 3 Jains 27 Hindus 728

As this classication, like the classifying act more generally, functions in part as a visual and informational presentation of how taxa are perceived to be related, such a vertical and segmented list is itself not only an unambiguous demonstration that the Jains were classied as non-Hindus but also that the Jains were identied
136 137 138

Numark, Translating Dharma. M. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York, 1872), p. 11. NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 3 Oct. 1835.

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The Scottish Discovery of Jainism as similar to Hindus, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Parsis in that they are all presented as distinct, exclusive and countable groups of people. In the nineteenth century a group of scholarly inclined Scottish missionaries in Bombay came to conceptualise and represent Jainism as a distinct religion possessing unique characteristics whilst also structurally isomorphic to other species of the religion genus. These Scottish missionaries may have thought they were explicating and analysing the Jain religion but at the same time they were also reifying Jainism in such a way that made it more amenable to being classied as an individual species of religion. Classifying Jainism as a religion and Jains as a religious community together with other religions and religious communities in tables, grids and sections of their publications was one concrete way in which they (1) reied Jainism into a religion-thing that was comparable and structurally equivalent to other religion-things and (2) congured and treated Jains as a religious community analogous to other religious communities. One should not ignore, however, that the Scottish missionaries image of the religion of the Jains to a certain degree reected and was probably informed by some of the ways in which some Jains themselves conceptualised and represented what in the nineteenth century became known as Jainism.

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