In the study of Asian religions, it is a truism to say that the tale of Rāma, the Rāmāyaṇa, is told and retold by Hindus. But that Jains tell and retell the Rāmāyaṇa is rarely acknowledged. Maybe this is because Jains are seen as a homogenous religious community derivative of Hindus, that Jain Rāmāyaṇas are seen as uninventive. Or maybe it is due to a practical obstacle: Jains wrote over thirty different Rāmāyaṇas, for which there exist few European translations and even fewer secondary studies in English. Whatever the reason, the diversity of Rāmāyaṇas that Jains composed from the turn of the Common Era have been mistakenly portrayed as a single tradition that responds primarily to Valmīki’s (Hindu) Rāmāyaṇa.
Thus, Gregory M. Clines’ monograph, Jain Ramayana Narratives: Moral Vision and Literary Innovation, provides a much-needed intervention in the study of Rāmāyaṇas. There, Clines aims to recast Jain Rāmāyaṇas as an internally diverse corpus of narratives. Each retelling responds to earlier Jain versions of the tale, as well as to a network of contemporaneous discourses. Such an argument could, of course, be proven in various ways. But given that Jainism has been misread as a religion concomitant with nonviolence and renunciation, Clines draws out the distinct visions of moral behaviour that each Jain Rāmāyaṇa constructs. He argues that each Jain retelling expresses a range of ethical values that include, but go beyond, prescriptions of nonviolent and nonattached action voiced by Jain doctrinal and commentarial texts.
To study all extant Jain Rāmāyaṇas—written in different languages, times, and places in South Asia—is an impossible task. Therefore, Clines confines his study to three premodern Jain Rāmāyaṇas written in two different languages: Raviṣeṇa’s Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa (7th century CE), and Jinadāsa’s Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa and vernacular Rāma Rasāo (15th century CE). Clines approaches each retelling with two questions: What literary innovations does each retelling make to its Jain predecessor? And how do these innovations reveal the author’s conceptualization of morality and personhood?
Clines provides a fine-grained analysis of innovations in language choice, meter, plot, characterization, themes, and aesthetic sentiments that each of the three Jain Rāmāyaṇas make to earlier Jain retellings. This type of analysis introduces not only the dialogical relations between Jain retellings but also the contemporaneous network of texts and discourses with which each retelling engages. For instance, Chapter 2 extrapolates the innovations that Raviṣeṇa’s Padmapurāṇa makes to the oldest extant Jain Rāmāyaṇa, Vimalasūri’s Paumacariya. In the 7th century, Raviṣeṇa drastically expands descriptions found in Vimalasūri’s Paumacariya by employing the poetic tropes and the sentiment of grief used by near contemporaneous genres of Sanskrit poetry (kāvya) and aesthetic theory (rasa). After detailing these innovations, Clines explains how these literary differences shape a distinct conceptualization of personhood. To take the example of Raviṣeṇa’s Padmacarita again, Clines explains that Raviṣeṇa’s uses the aesthetic of grief at targeted moments in the plot to encourage the reader to mourn Rāvaṇa’s descent from restraint to uninhibited attachments on the one hand, and to emulate with Rāma’s gradual detachment from the world on the other.
The comparison between Raviṣeṇa’s Padmapurāṇa and its Sanskrit retelling by Jinadāsa, explored by Clines in Chapters 3 and 4, furnishes the most substantial evidence for the internal diversity of Jain Rāmāyaṇas. The contrast in the structure of these two retellings and their attendant visions of personhood is far more pronounced. Jinadāsa compresses Raviṣeṇa’s Padmapurāṇa. He removes the poetic descriptions and long didactic dialogues from Raviṣeṇa’s tale. Even at the level of individual sentences, Jinadāsa jettisons excessive subordinate clauses and imagery that evokes multiple interpretations. Such innovations, Clines argues, achieve Jinadāsa’s self-proclaimed aim to make Raviṣeṇa’s Padmapurāṇa “clear” insofar as they limit the scope of interpretation of the narrative and its ethical import. To be more precise, Jinadāsa streamlines Raviṣeṇa’s narrative such that regardless of which narrative episode one reads, Rāma and Rāvana are presented as paragons of restraint and unrestraint, respectively.
As a monograph that aims to showcase the diversity of Jain tales of Rāma, it is successful. Jain Ramayana Narratives reveals that even Jain tales of Rāmā that belong to the same sectarian Jain tradition (Digambara Jainism) and that are written in the same language (Sanskrit), such as Raviṣeṇa’s Padmapurāṇa and Jinadāsa’s Sanskrit retelling, nevertheless profess distinct visions of personhood that are specific to the textual and historical context in which each author is located. Indeed, Jain Ramayana Narratives achieves the difficult task of addressing two sets of readers that occupy opposite ends of the academic spectrum: research specialists in the study of Jain narratives, and undergraduates new to the study of South Asian narratives entire. Clines regularly inserts his English translations of episodes from multiple Jain Rāmāyaṇas to allow the reader to engage directly with texts that have not been previously translated into European languages. This, together with Clines’ suggestions for future avenues of research (157-159), renders Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives an accessible point of departure for anyone venturing into the study of Jain Rāmāyaṇas broadly, or Raviṣeṇa’s and Jinadāsa’s retellings specifically.
Beyond the study of Rāmāyaṇas, the book’s focus on the nature of literary re-composition and the narrative construction of ethics can speak to the broader field of religious ethics. Clines frames his discussion of narrative ethics primarily within the context of Jain studies, with limited reference to other South Asian religions (13-15). Nevertheless, one could envisage this book being put into conversation with studies that take up similar questions in the study of Hindu and Buddhist narratives, such as Emily Hudson’s Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahābhārata (Oxford University Press: 2012) and Steven Collins’ numerous studies of Pali narratives and their vision of personhood. My suggestion does not undermine Clines’ arguments about Jain Rāmāyāṇas. It simply highlights yet another avenue for thinking about Jain narratives and their moral visions within the plural religious and literary context in which they emerged. Jain Rāmāyaṇa Narratives is thus a generative book that opens new directions for Jain Rāmāyaṇa studies.
Seema K. Chauhan is the Asoke Kumar Sarkar Early Career Fellow in Classical Indology at the University of Oxford.
Seema Kiren Chauhan
Date Of Review:
December 7, 2022
