the scottish ‘discovery’ of jainism in nineteenth-century bombay

THE SCOTTISH ‘DISCOVERY’ OF JAINISM INNINETEENTH-CENTURY BOMBAY*

MITCH NUMARK

This article examines the encounter between Protestant missionaries and theJains in nineteenth-century Bombay.1 It focuses on three Scottish missionary-scholars – John Wilson (1804–75), John Murray Mitchell (1815–1904) and JohnStevenson (1798–1858) – who played a leading role in orientalist and ethnographicscholarship coming out of Bombay and, more specifically, in the Bombay Branchof 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, whichwere published in 1848 as the Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva: Two Works Illustrativeof the Jain Religion and Philosophy.2 However, both John Wilson and John MurrayMitchell produced to a much greater degree and over a much longer period oftime than Stevenson something more valuable to the historian seeking to excavatenineteenth-century British ideas of Jains and Jainism: a record of over fifty yearsof contact with Jains living throughout western India.

The are a number of reasons why understanding the way in which nineteenth-century Bombay-based Scottish Protestant missionaries (who were also esteemedorientalists and ethnographers) conceptualised Jainism and understood the Jainsmight give us a fuller picture of the activities, ideas and encounters of Christianmissionaries and orientalists in colonial India. First, the Jains and Jainism havebeen largely overlooked in the scholarship on British orientalists in India. Second,the Jains and Jainism have received no attention whatsoever in the scholarshipon 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 2012.1 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 propername of the text Stevenson calls the ‘Nava Tatva Sutra’ or ‘The Nine Principles of Things’.

Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33.1, 2013, 20–51DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2013.0061© Edinburgh University Press 2013www.euppublishing.com/jshs

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The Scottish ‘Discovery’ of Jainism

attention to Bombay Presidency. Fourth, the nineteenth century was a watershedperiod in the European study of religions: it was the time when newly ‘discovered’religions, such as Jainism, attained recognition as religions and a new taxonomicregime of world religions superseded the four-fold scheme – Christianity, Judaism,Islam, and Heathenism/Paganism – through which Europeans had conventionallyparsed the religions of the world.3

Rather than examining the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ accounts of theJain religion and interactions with the Jains in isolation, this article seeks toanalyse and place the Christian missionary/Jain encounter within the largernineteenth-century Bombay context in which the Scottish missionaries alsointeracted with other communities and produced accounts of other religions.One aim of this article, then, is to highlight some of the ways in which Bombaymissionaries represented Jains and Jainism as both similar to and distinct fromother Indian communities and religions. One of its main arguments is thatthe state of orientalist scholarship (and specifically Jain studies) in the first halfof the nineteenth century, Bombay’s unparalleled religious diversity and largeJain population, and the particular importance Scottish missionaries placed on‘discovering’ the authentic religions of Bombay’s peoples helped to establish theconditions that led to the early European reification of ‘the religion of the Jains’into Jainism and fostered the view that Jainism was an independent religiondistinct from Hinduism decades earlier than scholars have previously supposed.4

The Reverend John Stevenson, the Kalpa Sutra and the SvetambaraTradition

Born in Stirlingshire in central Scotland, John Stevenson attended the universitiesof Glasgow and Edinburgh.5 In 1823 he was ordained and departed Scotland for

3 On the four-fold system of religious classification see P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religionsin the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–2, 39; T. Masuzawa, The Invention of WorldReligions: 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. 1–7, 45–56; E. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (2nd edition, London,1986), p. 18; J. Smith, ‘Religion, Religions, Religious’, in M. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for ReligiousStudies (Chicago, 1998), pp. 275–80.

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 JainStudies, 1 (2005), p. 2.

5 In contrast to John Stevenson, biographic information on his fellow Scotsmen John Wilson andJohn Murray Mitchell is readily accessible and need not be discussed here. See E. I. Carlyle, ‘Wilson,John (1804–1875)’, 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 ofReligious Knowledge in Colonial India and Bombay’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, 2006), ch. 1; M. Numark, ‘Translating Dharma: Scottish Missionary-Orientalists and the Politics of Religious Understanding in Nineteenth-Century Bombay’, Journalof Asian Studies, 70 (2011), pp. 471–500; M. Numark, ‘Hebrew School in Nineteenth-CenturyBombay: Protestant Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India’s Bene IsraelCommunity’, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (2012), pp. 1764–1808; L. A. Ritchie, ‘Mitchell, John Murray

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India as a missionary for the Scottish Missionary Society. He arrived in Indiaon 17 February 1824 – five years before John Wilson and fifteen years beforeJohn Murray Mitchell – and was first stationed in the southern Konkan beforerelocating (briefly) to Bombay City and then Pune. In 1834 he formally ceasedto be a missionary and took a position as an East India Company Church ofScotland chaplain.6 Nebulous health problems and family issues precipitated thischange in occupation.7 Despite his change of status, Stevenson ‘remained a truemissionary at heart’ and continued to promote the Christian missionary causeuntil his departure from India in 1854.8

John Stevenson is one of the most distinguished examples of the highlyeducated and intellectually inclined Scottish missionary-scholar who labouredin colonial India – the destination of choice for the most scholarly nineteenth-century British applicants for foreign missionary service.9 Reverend Stevensonwas particularly celebrated in Bombay for his many contributions to the scholarlystudy of India.10 In addition to writing a Marathi grammar, a Magadhi grammar,translating the complete Sama Veda into English and twenty-five hymns of theRig Veda into English and Marathi and publishing numerous studies in the Journalof the Royal Asiatic Society, he contributed more than twenty scholarly papers tothe Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.11 Like John Wilson

(1815–1904)’, 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 (1815–1904)’, in N. M. D. S. Cameron (ed.),Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Downers Grove, IL, 1993), pp. 594–5.

6 C. E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London, 1906), pp. 402–3; R. Hunter, History ofthe 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. 231–2.8 Mitchell, In Western India, p. 50; ‘Rev. Dr. Stevenson’, pp. 231–2. See also Home and Foreign

Missionary Record for the Church of Scotland, Sept. 1854, pp. 220–2. Stevenson remained with theestablished 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 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives andtraining of British Protestant Missionaries to India (Abingdon, 1984). Sir Richard Temple, Governor ofBombay, recognised the Scottish missionary penchant for scholarship in an 1879 speech in which helisted the ‘notable contributors’ who helped to establish the BAS as an institution of ‘considerableprestige 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 LiterarySociety of Bombay. . . and to the Journals of the Bombay Branch, Royal Asiatic Society. . . With A HistoricalSketch of the Society (Bombay, 1886), pp. 24–6.

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 Society—Rev. Dr. Stevenson’, OCS,7, 3rd ser., (1854), pp. 332–3.

11 J. Stevenson, The Principles of Murathee Grammar (2nd edition, Bombay, 1843). Stevenson wrotethis work with the assistance of Purshoo Ram Punt Godbolee, Dajee Shastree Shooklie, and theScottish missionary Robert Nesbit. Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 50–1. Stevenson, ‘Observations onthe Marathi Language’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society [hereafter JRAS], 7 (1843), pp. 84–91;J. Stevenson, ‘On the Intermixture of Buddhism and Brahmanism in the Religion of theHindus of the Dekkan’, JRAS, 7 (1843), pp. 1–8; J. Stevenson, ‘An Account of the Bauddho-Vaishnavas, or Vitthal-Bhaktas of the Dakhan’, JRAS, 7 (1843), pp. 64–73; J. Stevenson,‘Analysis of the Ganesa Purana, with Special Reference to the History of Buddhism’,JRAS, 8 (1846), pp. 319–29; J. Stevenson, ‘The Anti-Brahmanical Religion of the Hindus’,

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before him, Stevenson served as president of the BAS. While Stevenson madereference to Jains in many of his articles, his principal contribution to Jain studieswere his translations, the first ones in English, of the Kalpa Sutra and NavatattavaPrakarana; the latter, he claimed, was the ‘most popular [Jain] philosophical essay.’12

Stevenson’s Kalpa Sutra has been recognised as ‘the first translation of a non-philological Jain text [. . . ] into English.’13

The Kalpa Sutra has been described as ‘probably the best known of all Jaintexts.’14 The orientalist H. T. Colebrooke considered it ‘a work of great authorityamong the Jainas.’15 John Stevenson ascribed more significance to the Kalpa Sutra;in fact, he declared that it was the Jains’ ‘most sacred religious work.’16 Irrespectiveof the problems associated with this claim, this much is certain: before the 1870sthe Kalpa Sutra was one of the few Jain texts known to Europeans.17 Such astate of affairs may help to explain why orientalist scholars attributed so muchsignificance to the Kalpa Sutra and why it was one of the four texts that comprisedthe ‘Jain Sutras’ chosen for inclusion in Max Muller’s The Sacred Books of the East.18

Stevenson’s translation of the Kalpa Sutra was an achievement for its time thathelped to draw attention to Jain literature and thought in European orientalistcircles. ‘The Kalpasutram’, declared Albrecht Weber, ‘was the first Jain text whichwas 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 needsof Christian missionaries prompted Stevenson to undertake such a task.

In the introduction to his translation of the Kalpa Sutra, John Stevensondivulged that he ‘enjoyed advantages in the study of the Jain literature on this

JRAS, 8 (1846), pp. 330–9; J. Stevenson, ‘An Essay on the Vernacular Literature of theMarathas’, Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society [hereafter JBBRAS],1 (1841–1844), pp. 1–9; J. Stevenson, ‘The Dowry Received by Kashivan’, JBBRAS, 1(1841–1844), pp. 52–5; J. Stevenson, ‘An Essay on the Language of the Aboriginal Hindus’,JBBRAS, 1 (1841–1844), pp. 103–26; J. Stevenson, ‘Some Remarks on the Relation thatSubsists Between the Jain and Brahmanical Systems of Geography’, JBBRAS, 2 (1844–1847),pp. 411–5. For Stevenson’s Marathi publications, see Pinge, Yuropeyanacha Marathicha Amyas Va Sayva,pp. 294–303.

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. 175–6.15 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. 171–94; K. Folkert, ‘The “Canons” of

“Scripture”’, in M. Levering (ed.), Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany,NY, 1989), pp. 170–9; George Gilmore, New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (NewYork, 1910), s. v. ‘Jainism’.

18 Paul Dundas attributes the Kalpa Sutra’s significance in Hermann Jacobi’s 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. 65–6. Kendall Folkert makes a similar argumentregarding the inclusion of the Kalpa Sutra in Muller’s Sacred Books of the East; Folkert, ‘The “Canons”of “Scripture”’, p. 175.

19 A. Weber, Weber’s Sacred Literature of the Jains, trans. H. W. Smith (Bombay 1893), p. 104.

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side of India [western India], which are unattainable in Bengal.’20 What madeBombay Presidency a more advantageous place to study Jain literature than BengalPresidency? One of Stevenson’s advantages for studying Jain literature in Bombaymay have been his proximity to western India’s Svetambara Jain libraries. Butwhile he almost certainly knew of the existence of at least some of the Jainlibraries, there is no evidence that he either visited those libraries or obtainedmaterials from them. In light of the fact that in addition to Magadhi manuscriptshis translation of the Kalpa Sutra was also achieved through the use of Gujaratimanuscripts,21 the accessibility to Gujarati speakers may have been an advantagefor studying Jain literature in western India. One might further suppose that thelarge (primarily Gujarati-speaking) Jain population living in Bombay City and thesurrounding region was another advantage.22 However, neither Stevenson’s lettersto the Scottish Missionary Society nor his publications reveal much interactionwith Jains. As far as I am able to discern, he recorded interactions with very fewJains indeed, perhaps as few as one or two: a Jain informant and a yati23(possiblythe same person) who assisted him in his study of Magadhi and his translation ofthe Kalpa Sutra.24

Considering his groundbreaking contribution to Jain studies, it may seemodd that Stevenson seems to have neither visited Jain sites in western India norinteracted with more Jains. But despite his very limited interaction with livingJains, being stationed in the region of India with the largest concentration ofSvetambara (‘White-clad’) Jains surely contributed to his Svetambara inflectedidea 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 hewas aware of and referred to Digambara (‘Sky-clad’) Jains the Kalpa Sutra is aSvetambara Jain text recited during Paryusan, ‘the most important annual festivalof the Svetambar Jains.’25 Put differently, while early scholars of the Jains may havebeen 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 interpretedJainism in a manner that conformed to a more Svetambara inflected notion ofthe Jain religion at least in part because for the thirty years he lived in Indiahe was based in the region that contained the largest population of SvetambaraJains.26

20 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. xxvi. This comment seems to have been directed atH. T. Colebrooke.

21 J. Wilson, ‘Review of the Present State of Oriental, Antiquarian, and Geographical Researchconnected 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 310times 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 andworldly knowledge.’ Dundas, Jains, pp. 66, 280.

24 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. xxv, 138.25 Cort, ‘Svetambar Murtipujak Jain Scripture’, pp. 176–7.26 Cort, ‘Models of and for the Study of the Jains’, p. 52.

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Bombay’s Religious Diversity, Epistemological Imperatives of theScottish Missionary-Orientalists and the ‘Discovery’ of Jainism

Compared to some of the tribal peoples of western India and Bombay’s Hindus,Muslims, Parsis, Jews and Goankars (Roman Catholics), the Jains receivedrelatively little attention in the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ publications andin their manuscript letters and reports. But one should not attribute theirminimal treatment of the Jains to disinterest. Rather, the comparatively limitedattention they devoted to the Jains was most likely partially a consequence of theremarkable heterogeneity of Bombay’s population and the Scottish missionaries’numerous activities and commitments. Although they complained about thetime-consuming difficulties that Bombay’s linguistic and religious diversity placedon the Christian missionary, they nevertheless found Bombay City an especiallyappealing missionary station partly because it was so religiously diverse.27 AsJohn Wilson explained: ‘With regard to Bombay in particular, I can freely say,that when I consider its immense population, the different bodies of which thatpopulation is composed [. . . ] I do not know a spot where I could with morewillingness, desire to spend, and to be spent for the name of Christ.’28

Bombay’s religious heterogeneity seemed to have facilitated the Scottishmissionaries’ work amongst, and scholarly and polemical writing on, India’sreligious minorities and minority religions such as the Jains and Jainismrespectively.29 After all, much of their labour and ink was spilled on two ofBombay’s other minority communities: Parsis and Jews. The Scots consideredthe Jains as influential a religious minority as the Parsis and the Baghdadi Jews.They were unquestionably aware that they were not able to give the Jains theattention they thought the Jains merited. As John Wilson explained in a reportfrom the early 1830s, ‘It is much to be regretted that no books intended for theirbenefit have yet been prepared by Christians.’30 Sixteen years later he declared thatthe ‘influential Jainas have hitherto been far too much overlooked in missionaryoperations in India’.31 This and other observations identifying the Jains as ‘themost 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 Studyof the Growth of the Indian Church in Bombay Ciety from 1813, 2nd ed. (Bombay 1853), p. 73; NationalLibrary 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 andPhilanthropic Register, 12 (1830), pp. 198–9.

29 On the study of ‘the Jains’ as distinct from the study of ‘Jainism’ and the difference betweenquestions such as ‘What is Jainism?’ and ‘Who are the Jains and what are their religious beliefs?’ seeCort, ‘Models of and for the Study of the Jains’, pp. 42–71. See also Cort, Jains in the World: ReligiousValues 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 Churchat Home and of Its Missionary Agents Abroad (Edinburgh 1849), p. 238.

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interest in, and work on and amongst, the Parsis was partly undertaken becausehe deemed them an important group.32

In contrast to John Stevenson, most of the most significant and long-termScottish missionaries in Bombay Presidency – John Wilson, John Murray Mitchell,James Mitchell and Robert Nesbit – seem to have been delighted by theirencounters with Jains and took pains to document those encounters. Why, then,did Scottish missionaries like John Wilson and J. M. Mitchell interact with moreJains and record and devote more attention to the practices and beliefs of livingJains than Stevenson? One answer to this question may be that whereas both JohnWilson and J. Murray Mitchell labored as Christian missionaries in India for nearlyfifty years, Stevenson served as a Christian missionary for only ten of his thirtyyears in India.

Geoffrey Oddie’s recent examination of the differences between orientalist andProtestant missionary ideas of Hinduism and the different sources from whichthese ideas were formulated may help throw light on why John Wilson and J.Murray Mitchell observed and documented the actual practices and beliefs ofcontemporary Jains whereas John Stevenson’s account of the Jains and descriptionof what ‘the Jains believe’ seems to have been based largely on the Kalpa Sutra andNavatattava Prakarana.33 He argues that Protestant missionaries’ ideas of Hinduismwere based on the sorts of information often ignored by the typical, ostensiblysecular, orientalist scholar and that the agenda that propelled the former to studyand write about Hinduism was, in important ways, different from that of thelatter. He further argues that the goal to spread the Gospel in India predisposedChristian missionaries to: first, interact with ‘a much broader range of people’than the typical Orientalist scholar; second, visit out-of-the-way towns andvillages and therefore examine rural Indians’ conception and practice of theirreligion; and third, take a serious interest in subaltern and popular notions ofHinduism. For Oddie, these peculiar Christian missionary experiences, goals andinclinations were bound to make Protestant missionary ideas of Hinduism ‘morevaried, broader in scope and more contemporaneous than depictions of “theHindu religion” drawn from descriptions and comments by orientalists interestedprimarily or exclusively in ancient brahmanical texts’ and inclined them toward agreater interest ‘in popular religion and in the ideas and practices of the middleand lower classes and castes’ than the typical orientalist.34

Not only did John Wilson and other Scottish missionaries interact with Jains inBombay City and on their preaching tours and research investigations throughoutwestern India, but they also interacted with Jains attending their schools. In

32 Wilson, ‘Research Connected with the West of India’, pp. 507–8; 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. 26–7.

33 Like Jainism, ‘Hinduism’ was, for Europeans, a newly ‘discovered’ religion disinterred from thevast hodgepodge of beliefs and practices previously denominated Heathenism/Paganism.

34 G. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900(New Delhi, 2006), pp. 93–107.

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1832, for example, forty-two Jain students attended Scottish missionary schoolsin Bombay Presidency, which was a greater number than any other ‘class ofnatives’ apart from Hindus.35 Three years later, however, Hindu, Muslim, andRoman Catholic students outnumbered Jain students in Scottish missionaryschools in Bombay.36 By the end of the 1830s Bene Israel Jewish students wouldalso outnumber Jains.37 As the century progressed Jain students seemed to haverepresented a dwindling percentage of the student-body attending the schoolsassociated with John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell. Indeed, reports from the1840s through the 1860s often do not mention any Jains whatsoever attendingChurch of Scotland and Free Church of Scotland schools.38

Notwithstanding John Stevenson’s 1848 translations of the Kalpa Sutra and theNavatattava Prakarana, Jainism is the religious system represented in Bombay thatwas least discussed by the Scottish missionaries. However, that does not meanthat Jainism was ignored. Between 1851 and 1875 John Wilson published threelengthy scholarly essays on ancient monuments and sites in western India that hecharacterised as belonging to ‘the Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina religions.’39

He published only one polemical text addressed specifically to the Jains, the 1835Letter to the Jaina Priests of Palitana.40 Other than that publication neither he norany other Scottish missionary, apart from Stevenson, published anything exclusivelyon the Jains and Jainism. But the Oriental Christian Spectator – a periodical Wilsonfounded and edited – reprinted orientalist scholarship on the Jains and publishedother Jain-related materials.41 More importantly, descriptions of the Jains andaccounts 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. Mitchell’s publications.42 Inthe main, the content and tenor of those accounts, like accounts of the Jains andJainism written by non-Scottish missionaries in Bombay, anticipate what has beendescribed as the long-standing ‘standard portrait for understanding the Jains thatdominates Jain (and Indian) studies [that] was developed in the course of the early

35 Wilson, ‘Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832’, pp. 71–4.36 NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 3 Oct. 1835.37 NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 31 Dec. 1839.38 Hunter, History of the Missions of the Free Church of Scotland, pp. 202–82.39 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, ‘SecondMemoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries, and other Ancient Buddhist, Brahmanical andJaina Remains of Western India’, JBBRAS, 4 (1853), pp. 340–79; Wilson, Lecture on the ReligiousExcavations 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 and1852 respectively. All three editions were published in Gujarati. In 1839 Wilson reported that 1500copies of this text were printed in Bombay at his ‘own expense’, and that he had been almost totallyreimbursed 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. 455–61, 540–45; J. Glasgow, ‘Jaina Hymn’, OCS, 6, 2nd ser. (1845), pp. 21–4.

42 J. Wilson, ‘The Peculiar Claims of India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize’, OCS, 9, 2nd ser.(1848), pp. 2–66, Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 236–238; J. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of theBombay Presidency (Bombay, 1876), pp. 45–55; Mitchell, In Western India, pp. 67–71; J. M. Mitchell,Great Religions of India (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. 204–208.

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flurry of Jain studies in the [the last quarter of the] nineteenth century, primarilyby German philologically-oriented scholars.’43

Especially before 1848, the nominal treatment of Jainism in the numerouspublications of the Bombay Scottish missionaries may have been a result of theiruncertainty about and limited knowledge of and access to the Jains’ sacred textsor so-called scriptures.44 With insufficient access to and knowledge of the Jains’sacred texts John Wilson and his Scottish colleagues did not possess what theygenerally believed was the most authoritative source of information for any speciesof religion: its scriptures.45 As early as 1833, one can find Wilson referring to thesutras of the Jains.46 Significantly, whereas in the period between 1829 and 1848Wilson frequently referred to Muslim, Hindu, and Parsi scriptures by name, Iknow of no instance in which he attributed a name to any of the Jain sutrasbefore the 1848 publication of Stevenson’s Kalpa Sutra. The fact that Wilson didnot refer to the Jain sutras by name, however, may merely be symptomatic ofhis nominal treatment and minimal knowledge of Jainism compared to his moreextensive examination and knowledge of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.

The comparatively small amount that the Bombay Scottish missionaries wroteabout the Jain religion should not be seen in isolation from the contemporaneousEuropean treatment and understanding of Jains and Jainism. Before the last quarterof the nineteenth century Jainism received little attention from Europeans writingon the religions of the East. Surely the minimal attention to Jainism in Europeandiscourse on religions was connected to the predominant European belief thatthe Jain religion was not, in fact, an independent religion, but rather a Buddhistor a Hindu sect.47 This perspective on the identity of the Jains and their religionstemmed from (and was supported by) the work of orientalist scholars – such asH. H. Wilson and H. T. Colebrooke – whose experience in India was largelylimited to a region with very few Jains: Calcutta and the Bengal Presidency.48

Notwithstanding the London-based Oriental Translation Fund’s 1842 and 1848publications of Stevenson’s Sanhita of the Sama Veda and the Kalpa Sutra and NavaTava, the overall indifference to orientalist scholarship originating in Bombay

43 See, for example, Panchang San [‘Daily Almanac’] (Bombay, 1847), pp. 136–41; ‘Mumbaitil JainLokanvishani’ [‘The Jains of Bombay’] Dnyanodaya 7 (1848), pp. 120–3; Nirnirale Dharma [‘Varietiesof Dharma/Religion’] (Bombay, 1851), pp. 75–84; J. Wilson, ‘The Peculiar Claims of India as a Fieldof Missionary Enterprize’, OCS, 9, 2nd ser. (1848), pp. 2–66, Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp.236–38; J. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1876), pp. 45–55; Mitchell, InWestern India, pp. 67–71; J. M. Mitchell, Great Religions of India (Edinburgh, 1905), pp. 204–8.

44 Although the Bombay Scottish missionaries identified the division of the Jains into Digambarasand Svetambaras, they did not attribute to them different ‘canons’ of sacred texts.

45 See Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’, pp. 479–93.46 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. Colebrooke’s accounts of Jainism, see L. Orr,

‘Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains: The South Indian Story’, in T. Trautman (ed.), The MadrasSchool of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India (New Delhi, 2009), pp. 275–7.

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produced during the first half of the nineteenth century – scholarship whichwould have exposed European scholars to information militating against the ideathat the Jains were a sect of Hindus – may have further hindered the growthof Jain studies in European orientalist circles. As Leslie Orr has observed: ‘Thedominance of the scholarship coming out of Calcutta – with Jones, Colebrooke,Wilson, and Prinsep serving successively as the heads of the Asiatic Society ofBengal—shaped the course of the study of Indian religious history.’49

In John Wilson’s speeches to the BAS and in his articles about its contributionto scholarship on India, he both called attention to the Society’s relative neglectof the Jains and Jainism and discussed some of the reasons why British scholarsshould investigate the Jains and their religion. In an 1856 article, for example,he acknowledged Rev. Stevenson’s contribution to the study of Jainism, butnevertheless conceded that Jain literature had been ‘far too little studied.’50 Twodecades earlier – and twelve years before the appearance of Stevenson’s KalpaSutra – Wilson delivered a speech outlining the BAS’s accomplishments and goals:the acquisition of knowledge about languages, religions, literature and ‘mannersand customs’ of India and its peoples. When discussing the Jains he informed theBAS that its library had acquired some valuable manuscripts that he contendedwould further disclose the religion of the Jains. However, he noted that the Jainmanuscripts the BAS possessed had not been seriously examined. After informingthe 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 itsmembers ‘to continue to contribute [. . . ] to the exposition of the systems of faith,which have so long exercised their sway in this country.’ Here one finds Wilsonpublicly recognising the importance of elucidating the Jain religion, calling forthat elucidation to be undertaken and acknowledging how little had been doneto that end.51

Rev. Wilson’s 1836 acknowledgement of the shortcomings in Europeanknowledge about ‘the religion of the Jains’ is useful insofar as it helps one totrack developments in the British ‘discovery’ of Jainism over the course of thenineteenth 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 importanceof Britons obtaining more accurate and comprehensive information on, andtherefore a better understanding of, India’s other religions, literatures, languagesand peoples. To achieve that goal he urged the Society to expand its manuscriptcollection and encouraged its members to investigate and translate Buddhist, Parsi,Hindu and Jain texts and manuscripts.52 His call to acquire, examine and translateJain and Hindu manuscripts was partially realised when John Stevenson translated

49 Ibid., 277.50 Wilson, ‘Research Connected with the West of India’, p. 508.51 J. Wilson, ‘Address read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’, Journal of the

Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5 (1836), pp. 304–12.52 Ibid.

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the Sama Veda, Kalpa Sutra and Navatattava Prakarana into English; it was furtherrealised in the 1870s when Georg Buhler and Hermann Jacobi procured andcatalogued manuscripts located in western India’s Jain libraries.

To grasp fully the significance and meaning of John Wilson’s appeal tothe BAS to study India’s religions and communities it is useful to appreciatethat he and other Scottish missionaries in Bombay considered the religions,literatures, languages and ‘manners and customs’ of India’s peoples as inter-related, complementary and overlapping objects of knowledge.53 For Wilson,the importance of attaining a comprehensive understanding of many formsof knowledge related to India was especially relevant to disseminating theGospel.

While divine truth must be propagated with unwavering fidelity [. . . ]judgement ought to be employed in the mode of its application to those whovary much in their creeds, and differ much in their moral practice. [. . . ] I musthold that there is no little unsuitableness in India, in addressing a Pantheist asa Polytheist, and vice versa: in speaking to a Jaina as to a Brahman [. . . ] and inusing theological terms, and general phrases, without any very definite senseof their application by the natives themselves.54

The success of spreading Christianity in India thus depended on the missionariesrecognising the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of India’s ‘systems of faith’. Sinceknowledge of India’s religions was considered the key to native society and thenative mind, knowledge of India’s ‘systems of faith’ was the most all-encompassingand important information the colonial government, the BAS and Christianmissionaries could obtain.

Destitute of a knowledge of these [religious] systems, and the works in whichthey are embodied, the native character, and the state of native society, willnever be sufficiently understood, a right key obtained to open the native mind,and all desirable facilities enjoyed for the introduction among the people of abody of rational and equitable law, and the propagation of the Gospel, and thepromotion of general education.55

Thus, an understanding of India’s religions would sustain and further achieve whatRev. Wilson and his colleagues considered were essential and inextricably linked

53 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 Similarityand 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, Bombay1873), pp. 24–5.

54 Wilson, ‘Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’, pp. 310–11.55 Ibid.

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British goals, namely, to rule India more effectively, to improve India and to betterpropagate the Gospel.56

Although John Wilson and J. Murray Mitchell, in official and unofficialcapacities, worked with and for the colonial government, it is clear that whilststationed in India they considered themselves first and foremost Christianmissionaries.57 Consequently, they were especially insistent that Christianmissionaries acquire extensive knowledge of India’s religions. As Wilson declared,‘the study of the customs, creeds, and the religions of the people of India bymissionaries ought to be practised not incidentally but as a duty.’58 This duty forthe Bombay Scottish missionaries – in contrast to the Calcutta-based missionaryand Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlander Alexander Duff – perforce required theChristian missionary to study both the vernacular and the ancient languages ofthe 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 andaddress, and the readiest methods of forming and maintaining an acquaintancewith those whose welfare you seek. [. . . ] Of not less importance than thematters to which I have now referred, and demanding perhaps still moreapplication is the study of the native religions, embracing if possible, that of theSanskrit and other dead languages, in which their sacred books are written.59

In essence, understanding ‘the Jain religion’ and, more broadly, all of India’sreligions and understanding Indian vernacular languages and the languages oftheir sacred books was necessary for the Christian missionary because it wouldfacilitate the conversion of Indians to Christianity by empowering the missionaryto make use of non-Christian religious knowledge and Indian languages to devisethe most appropriate and effective manner to reach Indians and disseminate theGospel.60

Bombay’s large Jain population help to create among the Scottish missionariesthe idea that Jainism was a distinct religion. Indeed, more broadly, Bombay’sreligious diversity fostered the Scottish missionaries’ examination of religionsother than Hinduism and Islam and facilitated their study of and interactionwith peoples that they considered were neither Hindus nor Muslims. As a

56 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. 27–8.

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, 1872–73 (London, 1873), pp. 20–2.59 Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 66–71; Numark, ‘Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century

Bombay’, p. 1783 n. 83.60 Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’, pp. 477–8.

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consequence, when John Wilson appealed to Christian missionaries and BASmembers to acquire a thorough understanding of India’s religions he emphasisedand clearly meant the religions of India, rather than merely Hinduism or any otherindividual species of religion.61 J. Murray Mitchell likewise argued that Christianmissionaries must obtain knowledge of the religions of India.62 Such references to‘the religions of India’ should not be construed as an insignificant turn of phraseor as meaningless pluralising because it reflected their experience of India. Onlyin Bombay did one have the virtually unparalleled opportunity to observe andinteract with Jews, Parsis, Roman Catholic Goankars and Jains as well as withHindus and Muslims – sometimes, quite literally, at the same time.63 By contrast,Christian missionaries, orientalist scholars and colonial officials ensconced inBritish India’s two other great presidency cities, Calcutta and Madras, simply didnot have the same opportunity as Bombay-based missionaries to interact withJews, 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 BengalPresidency and 24,962 Jains, 143 Parsis and 30 Jews were recorded as residents ofMadras Presidency.65

Bombay’s large Jain and Parsi populations along with the Scottish missionaries’desire and effort to understand the religions of Bombay’s peoples predisposedChristian missionaries like John Wilson and John Murray Mitchell, at a relativelyearly date, to recognise, conceptualise and objectivise the religions of Jains andParsis as two individual religions: Jainism and Zoroastrianism. It is therefore notcoincidental that as early as 1840 and 1843 Scottish missionaries in Bombayused the terms Jainism and Zoroastrianism to identify two individual species ofreligion before these terms had acquired a wide currency and before the OxfordEnglish Dictionary’s earliest inclusion of them (1858 and 1854 respectively).66 Forexample, 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 toCalcutta and Madras (cities essentially created by the British), Bombay was a Portuguese colony until1661.

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 Statesman’s Year-Book: Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of theWorld (London, 1891), p. 122. I thank Dan Sheffield 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 Undertakenwith 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 Conflict of Genius andAuthority in India. No. III. Buddhism and Jainism, Opposing Brahmanism’, OCS, 9, 2nd ser. (1842),pp. 343–5.

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noun Jainism numerous times in a manner that unambiguously presented it as anindividual ‘religion’ distinct from and in conflict with Hinduism.

Every thing [in Gujarat] demonstrates the early extensive prevalence of Jainismover western India; the chief merchants and men of property are generally ofthat religion; and this fact will partly account for the spirit of doubt, and theunfixedness of religious belief, which is much more characteristic of Gujaratand the immediately adjacent tracts than of the Maratha country. Every thingalso betokens a hard struggle between Brahmanism and Jainism, in which thelatter was finally vanquished. Still it was not extripated, and although no longerflourishing as of old in the sunshine of royal favour, it remains to support adiversity of religious belief, and instill doubts of the truth of Brahmanism. True,error is widely or rather universally prevalent – and the Christian missionarymust war as resolutely against Jainism, the embodiment of the infidel spirit, asagainst Brahmanism, the embodiment of the superstitious spirit; yet may henot rejoice that the various forms of error are mechanically opposed, and inpart mutually destructive?67

A conceptualisation of Jainism as a distinct ‘religion’ is also indicated by J. M.Mitchell’s prediction that the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster’s newly establishedmission in Gujarat would eventually introduce another religion (Christianity) intothe 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 inBombay were similarly situated to conceptualise and reify the religion of theJains as Jainism. Take, for example, the 1851 Protestant missionary-producedtext Ninirale Dharma (‘Varieties of Dharma/Religion’). As a Marathi-languageencyclopedic explication of what was deemed the nine species of the dharma quareligion 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. Anotherinteresting feature of that text, and one related to the English term Jainism, isthat whereas all of the religions are rendered into Marathi as manifestations ofthe dharma taxon the ‘ism’ suffix in Ninirale Dharma’s English-language table ofcontents is only used for Judaism, Buddhism, and Jainism – all the other religionsinclude 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 Irelandestablished its mission in the Gujarat’s Kathiawar region on John Wilson’s recommendation and withhis assistance. See Smith, Life of John Wilson, pp. 294–8; The Church at Home and Abroad, April 1889,pp. 340–2. On the Irish Presbyterian mission in India, see R. Jeffrey, The Indian Mission of the IrishPresbyterian Church (London, 1890).

68 NLS, MS. 7532(I), J. M. Mitchell to A. Brunton, 22 July 1840.

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Catholic Religion, the Muhammadan Religion, the Hindu Religion, the ParsiReligion and the Religion of the Sikhs.

Christian Proselytization, Anti-Catholic Projections and the Reificationof Jainism

The Bombay Scottish missionaries’ method of Christian proselytisation alsoprompted them to attain a masterly knowledge of India’s religions that furtherpredisposed them to reify (or to build upon or to adopt an earlier or ongoingreification of) the various beliefs, practices and texts of Bombay’s peoples intodiscrete and concrete religions such as Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism.Essentially, their proselytising method aimed at undermining Indian confidence intheir religions by demonstrating that the Jain, Parsi, Hindu and Muslim religions(as well as Rabbinic Judaism and Roman Catholicism) were, in contradistinctionto the Christian religion, largely absurd and false.69 But before this could beachieved the Scots had to possess accurate knowledge of ‘the religions’ ofBombay’s manifold peoples. As I have argued elsewhere, obtaining genuineknowledge of a particular religion primarily meant, for them, understandingits putative sacred texts.70 If one bears in mind the nascent state of Europeanknowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century of what was taken to bethe Hindu religion, the Parsi religion and especially the Jain religion, then theacquisition of knowledge about those religions required missionaries like JohnWilson and John Stevenson to initiate (or contribute to) the reification of thevery religions they sought to know.

When compared to European knowledge of religions other than Jainism(including Hinduism and Zoroastrianism) the significance of the absence ofknowledge about the Jain religion in the 1820s through the late 1840s cannotbe overemphasised. Before the publication of John Stevenson’s Kalpa Sutra andNava Tatva: Two Works Illustrative of the Jain Religion and Philosophy (1848) nopublication existed as a source of information on Jainism equivalent to textslike W. Ward’s A View of the History, Literature and the Religion of the Hindoos(1815–1818), A. H. Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend-Avesta: Ouvrage de Zorastre (1771)and his Oupnek’hat (Upanishads, 1787) or G. Sale’s Koran: Commonly Calledthe Alkoran of Mohammed (1734). Nor was there any publication on the Jainsequivalent to the numerous other publications and translations about and relatedto Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism and even the Parsi religion.There was simply no comprehensive account of or textbook on Jainism one couldconsult in the 1820s and 1830s analogous to the publications that existed on anumber of other religions including Hinduism and Zoroastrainism. Furthermore,before 1848 Christian missionaries could not consult a published sacred text of

69 See Piggin, Making Evangelical Missionaries, ch. 8.70 Numark, “Translating Dharma’.

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the Jains, whereas they could consult various published Hindu, Parsi and Muslimsacred texts in English, Sanskrit, Persian, Latin and French. Without such materialon the Jain religion how could the Scottish missionaries make sense of the religionof the Jains and consequently expose its errors and contradictions?

The project of discovering, understanding, printing and (sometimes) translatingthe sacred texts of the Hindu religion, the Parsi religion and the Jain religionwas necessary before the Bombay Scottish missionaries could participate in anenterprise that Wilfred Cantwell Smith has described broadly as ‘mentally makingreligion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective systematicentity.’71 Once the stuff that made India’s religions religions were convertedinto relatively coherent and conceptually bounded religion-things – namely,Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Hinduism – the Scots were able to interrogate moresystematically and rigorously what was thought to be the Jain religion, theParsi religion and the Hindu religion to acquire the type of information theirproselytising schema required them to obtain. And once the non-Christianreligions were sufficiently reified and knowledge of those religions obtained,Scottish missionaries in Bombay could examine the textual traditions of thereligions (the supposed depositories of genuine religious knowledge) to unearththeir internal contradictions, absurdities, ahistoricity, immorality and overallspuriousness. To put it another way, they had to undertake an investigativeprocedure that was more or less the same kind of investigative project theyentreated their Indian students and interlocutors to undertake: a method ofreligious inquiry that began, quite literally, with the question, ‘What is thereligion?’ After that question was answered the inquirer could proceed to thesecond principle question of the Scots’ scheme of religious investigation: ‘Is thereligion true?’72

Having reified and transformed the religion of the Hindus, the religion ofthe Parsis and the religion of the Jains into objective, systematic, boundedand individual religion-things – structurally isomorphic to other entities deemedreligions – denominated Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism, the BombayScottish missionaries could procure the material on those newly labeled religionssimilar 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 contraryto the discoveries of science and the truths of nature. Once the ‘erroneous’and ‘irrational’ nature of the non-Christian religions was sufficiently proventhe Scottish missionaries would introduce and explicate the Bible to theirIndian readers, students and discussants and demonstrate the conclusion thatthe Scots themselves had already held: that ‘real [Protestant] Christianity’ wasthe only reasonable, consistent, godly and scientifically and historically accurate

71 W. C. Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, p. 51.72 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.

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and verifiable religion. After such information was disseminated the Scottishmissionaries challenged Indians to compare the different religions so as todetermine for themselves which species of religion was true. Naive as it may seem,the Scottish missionaries confidently believed that if Indians possessed genuineknowledge of Christianity and of non-Christian religions and if they sufficientlyand sincerely undertook the comparative examination of the religions then theywould undoubtedly realise that Christianity was the one true religion and convertto it.73

The Scottish missionaries’ proselytising method of intellectually underminingthe religions of Bombay through the use of non-Christian religious knowledgewas deployed against the Jains in what is probably John Wilson’s first discussionof the Jains in print. In an 1833 report he wrote that he had unfolded tothe Jains ‘the contradictions of their Sutras [sacred texts], and the unbecomingnarratives connected with their Nathas [Tirthankaras ‘ford-makers’ or Lords].’74

Such criticism was essentially the Jain manifestation of the same type of criticismhe leveled against Hindu, Parsi and Muslim sacred texts, prophets and deities.75

Among the other ways in which the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ criticismand representation of Jainism resemble their criticism and representation ofHinduism, Zoroastrianism, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam concerns the place andfunction of priests. It is not incidental that the same essential criticism ofthe place and role of ‘priests’ in these religions was also for the Scots (andother Protestant missionaries) an especially heinous and intrinsic characteristic ofRoman Catholicism. Their understanding of Indian religions was in large part anisomorphic projection and homologous expression of the longstanding Protestantview of Roman Catholicism: it was a recapitulation of long-held Protestantanti-Catholic polemic displaced from the confessional conflicts of Europeanhistory and transplanted onto an Asian context in which the people concernedwere not only Roman Catholics, but also Jains, Hindus, Parsis, Jews andMuslims.76

John Wilson’s contention that Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Islampromoted the idea that sin could be removed by way of works is but oneexample of how the Scottish missionaries’ critique of non-Christian religionsmirrored stock Protestant criticism of Roman Catholicism. Thus, when Wilsoncriticized Jain yatis for claiming that a person could ‘destroy sin, and remove itsevil consequences by the performance of good works’ and when he informedthem of the errors of supererogation, he could have just as easily been speakingto Roman Catholic priests about what he, like most other evangelical lowland

73 For a more detailed examination of the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ conversion method seeNumark, ‘Translating Religion’, ch. 3; Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’. Some Jains ‘converted’ toChristianity. 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. 479–84.

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ministers (and numerous other Protestants since the reformation), believed wasan 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 theJains and Jainism from most other peoples and religions reflect conventionaltextbook characteristics ascribed to Jain thought and practice. Thus, whereas theScots ascribed the idea of ahimsa (non-harming/non-killing) to Jains, Buddhistsand Hindus, they thought that Jains practised ahimsa more fastidiously than Hindusand that the principle of ahimsa was more important in the Jain religion than itwas to the Hindu religion.79 Regarding the importance of ahimsa to the Jains,John Stevenson declared that ‘mercy to all animated beings’ was the first of thefive duties of the Jain religion and killing was greatest of the five sins.80 In a similarvein, John Murray Mitchell stated that ‘a fundamental maxim’ of Jainism was notto kill. But whereas J. M. Mitchell argued that Jainism stressed ‘the sacrednessof all life’ more than Buddhism, his older colleague, John Wilson, maintainedthat Buddhists and Jains displayed equal fervor ‘for the preservation of life, evenin its lowest forms.’81 Moreover, he considered both Buddhists and Jains as ‘farmore ostentatious, in their tenderness to life than the Brahmins.’ In 1851, Wilsonreported that the ‘Jatis, or Jaina priests’ at the base of Mount Girnar declared thatthe Jain religion was ‘the daya-dharma, the religion of mercy’, which he pointedout was ‘the most common designation of Buddhism on the cave inscriptions.’82

Ahimsa was not only a prominent element of Bombay missionaries’ accountsof Jainism but was also a common topic of discussion between Jains and Scottishmissionaries. Take, for instance, John Wilson’s 1835 account of his visit to Palitanain Gujarat in which he emphasised how the local Sravakas or ‘laymen of the Jainorder’ pleaded with him not to kill a lamb his party intended to slaughter forfood. To avoid giving offence, Wilson set the lamb free. This occurred only afterhe had informed the Sravakas of ‘the errors of the Jaina system as to the life ofbrutes.’ Following his account of the encounter, he described the Jain view of lifeand non-violence:

77 J. Wilson, ‘Narrative of a Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India’, OCS, 6 (1835), p. 292.78 J. Wilson, A Memoir of Mrs Margaret Wilson, of the Scottish Mission, Bombay (Edinburgh, 1838),

pp. 542–3.79 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. 70–1; Wilson, ‘Memoir on the Cave-Templesand Monasteries’, p. 98.

80 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. xxii.81 Mitchell, Great Religions of India, pp. 204–5; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency,

p. 46.82 Wilson, ‘Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries’, pp. 97–9.

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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 upis 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 anyrecognition of or reference to an idea often associated with Jain thought: thatdifferent living things are differentiated from each other based on the numberof senses different categories of beings possess. Here, Wilson’s indifference to orignorance of the ostensible textbook distinction in Jain thought between a single-sense jiva (sentient life/soul) and a five-sense jiva indicates the possible limitationof his knowledge before the 1848 publication of Stevenson’s translation of theNavatattava Prakarana.

Notably, after 1849 John Wilson’s accounts of Jainism and discussions of theJains became more scholarly and complex. As with the changes in Protestantmissionary ideas and depictions of Hinduism that Geoffrey Oddie contends tookplace between 1850 and 1900, the Bombay Scottish missionaries’ ideas of Jainismalso evolved over the course of the nineteenth century. The factors that Oddiesuggests prompted changes in the conception of Hinduism, such as ‘an increase insources of information’ and ‘the growth of studies in comparative religion’, seemto have also fostered changes in the Scottish missionary account of Jainism.84

Although Wilson’s conceptualisation of Jainism at the end of the third quarterof the nineteenth century is essentially the same as his earlier conceptualisation,differences do exist that coincide with, reflect and express developments in Jainstudies. Take, for example, Wilson’s 1876 essay on the Jains entitled ‘The Jainasand their Yatis or Jatis’ (hereafter, ‘Jainas’), which appeared in his posthumouslypublished Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency. Whereas his earlier accountsof the Jains and interpretations of Jainism seem to have been based primarilyon information he obtained from sundry living (Svetambara) Jains throughoutwestern 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 informedby John Stevenson, Albrecht Weber and Christian Lassen’s research on the Jainreligion published between 1848 and 1875.85

There are two particularly notable ways in which Wilson’s 1876 ‘Jainas’differs from his earlier writings. First, his 1876 work reveals a more nuancedaccount of how the Jains, at least theoretically, conceptualised jiva/jivas thanhis early exposition of the topic. Whereas in 1835 he claimed that the Jains‘make no distinction between the life of vegetables, brutes, men, and Godessentially considered’, his 1876 publication qualified and fruitfully complicatedhis earlier account: ‘They make no essential distinction between life in vegetables,

83 Wilson, ‘Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India’, p. 291.84 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, p. 231.85 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, pp. 45–55.

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worms, insects, fishes, birds, serpents, beasts, men, and superior beings, essentiallyconsidered, though they have the vital principle in different degrees.’86 This morecomplex interpretation may have come from reading of Stevenson’s translation ofthe Navatattava Prakarana – a text that discusses the different classes of animatedbeings 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 significantdifferences between John Wilson and his Scottish missionary colleagues’ earlywriting and Wilson’s 1876 ‘Jainas’. Before the 1860s the Bombay Scottishmissionaries 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 non-Christian religions, in practice if not in theory. To the Scottish missionariesthe priests of the Jains were primarily the yatis. Attributing priests to theJain tradition and rendering yatis as Jain priests should not be dismissed asan innocuous application of an inappropriate and anachronistic vocabulary andinterpretive scheme to the Jain tradition. Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century Bombay, especially but not exclusively Scotsmen, steeped in centuries ofvirulent anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism, ascribed to the purported priests ofvarious non-Christian religions – Muslim mullahs, Jewish rabbis, Hindu brahmins,Parsi dasturs and mobeds and Jain yatis – some of the same negative attributesProtestants had attributed to Roman Catholic priests since the sixteenth century.88

In Wilson’s 1876 ‘Jainas’, however, yatis are no longer characterised as or evendenominated Jain priests. In fact, in an astonishing volte-face, he contended thatthe ‘priest properly so called does not find a place in the system of either Bauddhasor Jains.’ His criticism of Stevenson’s rendering of the Magadhi Namo A’yarianamand the Sanskrit Namaskarosta A’charyebhyah of the ‘Jaina Confession or Creed’ as‘those who regulate our religious services’ further conveys his revised view of therole of priests in the Jain tradition, especially insofar as he characterised Stevenson’stranslation as ‘putting a Brahmaical [priestly] rather than a Jaina interpretation onthe designation [a’charya].’89 Instead of interpolating a priestly or Brahmanicalelement into the English translation of the ‘Jaina Confession or Creed’, Wilsonrendered Namaskarosta A’charyebhyah as: ‘Let there be salutation to the Observersof the conduct prescribed.’ He buttressed and legitimised the accuracy of histranslation by pointing out that ‘the most zealous propagator of Jainism’, theSamvegi Saduji Shricharitra Pradhana Swami, repudiated Stevenson’s translationand agreed with his own.90

86 Wilson, ‘Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India’, p. 291; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes ofBombay Presidency, p. 49.

87 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. 115–19.88 See Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’, pp. 479–90.89 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, p. 21; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency,

p. 47.90 Ibid., pp. 47–8. 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 ShricharitraPradhana Swami is probably a yati title rather than a mendicant name, despite the ‘samvegi’designation.

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Irrespective of Wilson’s assertion that the Jains ‘acknowledge the existence ofthe Hindu gods, especially the more ancient of them, though they place them in asubordinate, and to a certain extent contemptible, position’, another way in whichthe Scottish missionaries distinguished the Jains and Jainism from Bombay’s othercommunities and religions was their contention that the Jain religion repudiatedthe notions of a creator and a providential deity interceding in the world andtherefore promoted both a practical and an actual atheism.91 The ‘deliberatedoctrine’ 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 andencountered Jains who repudiated the notion of a providential deity and thereforeexpressed an opinion consistent with his idea of the Jain religion, he alsoencountered individual Jains who told him that they did indeed believe in theexistence of a providential deity. He described one Jain student as rejecting theatheism attributed to Jainism by repeatedly declaring: ‘Parame shvara che, Parameshvara che [sic]! ‘There is a Supreme Lord, there is a Supreme Lord!’93 Thisstudent was not the only Jain that the Bombay Scottish missionaries encounteredwho expressed a belief purportedly at odds with the ‘doctrines’ of Jainism. AtSonai in Gujarat, for instance, Wilson encountered Jains who he observed ‘allowedthe existence of one God in a manner inconsistent with the tenets of theirsect.’94 In 1864, ‘a benevolent Jaina banker’ financially ruined as a result of ‘madspeculation’ told Wilson: ‘I do believe in Is’hvara [God], though I have beentaught otherwise.’95 For J. M. Mitchell, Jain laymen had transformed the twenty-fourth 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 Jainsas ostensible adherents of the Jain religion were supposed to follow. Such a stateof affairs parallels the disjuncture the same missionaries observed between thesupposed authentic doctrines of Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Judaism andChristianity and the actual beliefs and practices of Bombay’s 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, ‘TheGod of the Bible and the Gods of the Sha’stras’, OCS, 5, 3rd ser. (1854), pp. 241–5; G. Smith, Lifeof John Wilson, p. 499; Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. 233–5; Mitchell, Great Religions of India,pp. 185–6.

92 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49; Wilson, ‘God of the Bible and Gods of theSha’stras’, p. 242.

93 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of Bombay Presidency, p. 49.94 Wilson quoted in G. Smith, Life of John Wilson, pp. 148–9.95 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 ofMahavira as well as shorter accounts of other tirthankaras, including the first (Rishabha) and twenty-third (Parsvanatha).

97 Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’.

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Jain criticism of Hindu texts and practices and assent to Christiancondemnation of Hinduism are other traits that distinguish the Jains from mostother Indian communities in the records of the Bombay Scottish missionaries. Forexample, in an 1833 report John Wilson remarked:

When the Jainas have first an opportunity of hearing a discourse, they generallyexpress their assent to a great deal of what is said. They are delighted to findthat we have no confidence in the Puranas, and that we disapprove of theprevailing religious practices of the Hindus.98

Over the following decades numerous similar statements (ostensibly depicting theJain perspective on the Hindu religion) can be found. For instance, at a disputationheld 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 howboth 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 JamesMitchell reported that the local Jain merchants seemed to have enjoyed his‘exposures of the folly of Hinduism.’100 Likewise, at Aitawada, Robert Nesbithad a discussion with several Jains who had heard that ‘their religion and ours[Christianity] agreed in many important points.’ Although Nesbit informed themthat they, like Hindus, professed a false religion, he nevertheless recorded how hewas ‘struck with the great force of reason and ridicule with which they ran downthe Brahminical scriptures.’101

There are a number of possible reasons why Scottish missionaries inBombay – especially during the first half of the nineteenth century – recorded,with notable alacrity, Jains criticising Hindu texts while rarely recording otherIndians (apart from Christian converts) criticising Hinduism. First, the Scots mayhave been merely documenting a common Jain perspective of Hindu texts like theVedas. Whether or not these nineteenth-century Jains encountered by the Scotshad actual knowledge of the works they criticised at least some Jains did not valuethe Brahmanical scriptures and therefore had no compunction about voicing theirdisapproval of them. The fact that many of the Jains they recorded expressing sucha view were not identified as yatis, acaryas or priests suggests that that perspectivewas not confined to the Jains they identified as belonging to the Jain clergy.

Another explanation for why the Bombay Scottish missionaries documentedJains criticising the Brahmanical scriptures not only concerns their impressionof the acrimonious relations between Jains and Brahmins of their day but also

98 Wilson, ‘Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832’, p. 72.99 Wilson, ‘Missionary Journey in the Northwest of India’, p. 329.

100 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 Mara’tha’ Country’, OCS, 1, 2nd ser. (1840),p. 76.

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their understanding of the relations between Jains and Hindus in the past. Oneof the first texts John Wilson read that discussed the past relationship betweenJains and Hindus was John Taylor’s 1812 translation of the Advaita VedantanKrishna Misra’s eleventh-century allegorical drama the Prabodha Chandrodaya.102

Several different worldviews appear in the Prabodha Chandrodaya as characters whopropound and debate their particular philosophies, including a Jain denominated‘Digamber.’ Some historians of pre-modern India have used the drama as evidenceof ‘the acrimony which certainly existed between the followers of different sectsin early medieval India.’103 Taylor’s 1812 English translation certainly lends itselfto such a reading and I see no reason why Wilson would not have interpretedthe Prabodha Chandrodaya as an illustration of the historical conflict between theJain and Hindu religious systems especially because such a conflict tallied withhis experience of witnessing Jains criticising Hinduism and his awareness of thehostility that purportedly existed between Jains and Hindus.104 Reading such atext surely reinforced his belief that Jains and Hindus adhered to different religions.Moreover, by using the content of the Vedas against individuals who valued theVedas, the Jain character in the Prabodha Chandrodaya criticised what was takento 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 Jainsthat set them apart from most Bombay religious communities. John Wilsonexplicitly differentiated the Jains in this regard when he wrote that the Jains‘have systems of proselytism, unknown almost to other classes of natives, veryactively at work’.106 The base of Mount Girnar in Gujarat was one place wherehe observed Jains seeking to make converts. According to Wilson, the Jains’ effortto 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 proselytisingand universal religion.108 Whatever the extent to which nineteenth-century Jainsactually sought to convert non-Jains to Jainism (what exactly such conversionswould entail and mean is another matter), the proselytising effort the BombayScottish missionaries ascribed to the Jains is especially worthy of attention becauseis was a trait they rarely ascribed to other Bombay religious communities.

In the introduction to his Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva John Stevenson discussedthe confessional amongst the Jains and ‘the necessity that exists of confessing atleast 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, Prabod’hChandro’daya, 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 justified is another matter.

104 See, for example, ‘Instance of Brahmanical Intolerance’ OCS, 1, 2nd ser. (1840), pp. 481–2.105 Taylor, Prabod’h Chandro’daya, p. 40n.106 Wilson, ‘Research Connected with the West of India’, p. 508.107 Wilson, ‘Memoir on the Cave-Temples and Monasteries’, pp. 83–98.108 Mitchell, Great Religions of India, p. 206.

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practice neither he nor his Scottish missionary colleagues attributed to any otherBombay religious community other than Roman Catholics. Stevenson himselfrecorded his astonishment at discovering that the confessional was an element of‘the Jain creed.’109 Here Stevenson is referring to pratikramana.110 Notwithstandingits place of in the Jain tradition, Stevenson’s translation and understanding ofpratikramana is one example of how the Bombay Scottish missionaries tended toconceptualise non-Christian religions through an interpretive framework shapedby Christianity’s concerns, controversies and history.111

The Relationship of the Jains to Buddhism and Hinduism

How did the Bombay Scottish missionaries conceive of the relationship betweenJains and Buddhists and understand the Jain connection to Buddhism? Apart froma single possible instance (discussed below) in which John Wilson referred toJains as ‘Buddhists’ without the qualification of ‘sect’ or ‘seceder’ there is noevidence that either he or his Scottish missionary colleagues identified the Jainsas ‘Buddhists’ without qualification. Nor would it be correct to say that theyreduced ‘the religion of the Jains’ to Buddhism rather than denominating it as adistinctive, albeit related, species of religion. That is not to say that there was noconfusion about the relationship between the Buddhist and the Jain religions.On the contrary, considering that Bombay missionaries and other Europeansdiscerned many similarities between the Jain and the Buddhist religions, andconsidering that nineteenth-century Europeans were in the throes of a conceptualrevolution in the way in which they imagined and classified the religions of theworld, it should hardly be surprising that considerable uncertainty existed aboutthe exact nature of the connection between Buddhism and Jainism.

The Bombay Scottish missionaries’ view of the connection between Buddhismand Jainism – especially in terms of their origins – was expressed in complex andvariable ways. In his 1848 Kalpa Sutra John Stevenson contended that the ideathat the Jain religion was merely ‘a corruption of the Buddhistical religion’was mistaken because Mahavira was the Buddha’s preceptor and the latter wasthe ‘favourite pupil’ of the former.112 Recently, Torkel Brekke has claimed thatStevenson 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, forexample, he conveyed uncertainty about the relationship between Jainism andBuddhism and their chronological priority: ‘the sect of the Jains, who are buta branch derived from the parent stem [Buddhism], or themselves the stem

109 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. xxiii–xxiv.110 Kristi Wiley describes pratikramana vis-à-vis the Jains as ‘confession of, and repentance for, faults

that one has committed or for infractions of one’s vows’. Wiley, Historical Dictionary of Jainism, p. 170.111 See Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’.112 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. ix–xvi.113 T. Brekke, Makers of Modern Indian Religion in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), p. 133.

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from which Buddhism sprung.’114 Whatever may have been his position on thechronology, it is important to keep in mind that in his 1848 Kalpa Sutra and NavaTatva he treated ‘the religion’ of the Jains as a religion that was closely connectedto but ultimately distinct from Buddhism.115

Like Stevenson, the manner in which John Wilson explicitly describedthe connection between Jainism and Buddhism was somewhat ambiguous andchanged over time. Unlike Stevenson, however, he seems never to have arguedthat Buddhism derived from Jainism. On the contrary, from the 1840s throughthe 1870s Wilson invariably asserted that Buddhism came into existence beforeJainism – an interpretation advanced earlier in the century by William Erskine(Wilson’s friend, orientalist, East India Company official and fellow Bombay-based Scot) and a view, which he noted, learned Jainas often acknowledged wasthe case.116 All in all, Wilson consistently posited Jainism’s close connection andsimilarity to, but not complete identity with, Buddhism.

The change in Wilson’s opinion of the relationship between Jainism andBuddhism is relatively minor and subtle but nevertheless evident in the changedvocabulary 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 andhas changed over time, and because it was only over the course of the nineteenthcentury that the term sect began to be ‘confined to the matters pertaining tothe internal divisions of a single religion,’ one should not necessarily interpretWilson’s references to Jains as Buddhist sectaries as meaning that he consideredJains as nothing more than Buddhists whose beliefs and practices diverged fromthe orthodox or standard form of their religion (Buddhism).118 By identifyingJains as Buddhist sectaries he may have meant that the religion of the Jains was avariant or expression of Buddhism. But by denominating the religion of the Jainsas the religion of the Jains and Jainism, rather than Buddhism or the Buddhistreligion, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he merely sought to convey theidea that the religion of the Jains was similar to Buddhism (and may have hadBuddhist origins or influences), which is qualitatively different from saying thatJainism was nothing other than an expression of Buddhism. Be that as it may, inthe 1850s one finds the beginning of a change in the vocabulary Wilson deployedto 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 notidentify 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. 4–5.

115 Stevenson, Kalpa Sutra and Nava Tatva, pp. vii–xxviii.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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Jainism as a distinctive religion but he also explicitly postulated nothing morethan a strong connection between Jains and Buddhists, especially in ‘their origin,tenets, and aspirations.’ Furthermore, in that same text he applied the term sectnot to the Jains in relation to Buddhism, but rather to indicate internal divisionswithin Jainism, such as the Svetambara sect and the Digambara sect.120

Appreciating how the Scottish missionaries understood Buddhism and Jainismwith reference to and in the context of how they understood other religionscan elucidate the ways in which they conceptualised Buddhism and Jainism asdistinct and connected religions. Similar to Bombay-based orientalist scholarswho were not missionaries, John Wilson certainly posited a close connectionbetween Jainism and Buddhism.121 The manner in which he organised individualpublications, however, gives the impression that he also envisaged Jainism andBuddhism, qua religions, as almost as distinct from each other taxonomicallyas they were from the religions denominated Hinduism, Muhammadanism andZoroastrianism. In the Evangelization of India, for example, he discussed various‘systems of religious error’ represented in India. Each individual system istreated 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 theindividual ‘systems of religious error’ were comprehended in fundamental ways asboth the same and different: they were the same in that they all shared somethingin common, namely, that they were all individual ‘systems of religious error’, butthey were also all different in that they possessed enough distinctive characteristicsto justify the classification of them as separate and exclusive systems. If the religionof the Jainas was Buddhism and if the Jains were merely a Buddhist sect, whywould Jains be given a distinct section when there existed a structurally equivalentsection on Buddhists? By the same token, if Jains were Buddhists why wouldWilson in three different publications characterise some ancient sites in India asbelonging to ‘the Buddhist, Brahmanical and Jaina religions’?123

Here it would be useful to explore a seeming incongruity in the historicalrecords of John Wilson that elucidates his view on the identity of Jains. In an1829 letter, which includes what may have been his earliest list of Bombaycommunities, Wilson noted the existence of Buddhists in Bombay City whilemaking no mention of Jains.124 His Bombay community taxonomies from the1830s, on the other hand, record Jains in Bombay City, Bombay Presidency andhis Scottish mission schools, but no Buddhists. In fact, I know of no instancesubsequent to 1829 in which Wilson claimed that Buddhists (as such) were living

120 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, pp. 45–55.121 See Orr, ‘Orientalists, Missionaries, and Jains’, pp. 277–9.122 Wilson, Evangelization of India, pp. ix, 226–47.123 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.

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in Bombay, except – perhaps – on those few occasions when he identified the Jainsnot only as Jains but also as a Buddhist sect. It is significant, however, that in atleast one of the publications in which he identified Jains as a Buddhist sect healso maintained that: (1) there were ‘no living representatives [of Buddhism] inour neighbourhood [western India]’ and (2) the ‘principal habitat’ of the Jainswas ‘now in Western India.’125 The most plausible explanation for these seemingdiscrepancies is simple: his experience in Bombay as a Christian missionary,Orientalist scholar and ethnographer led him to revise the vocabulary by which heclassified Bombay’s communities and religions. It is apropos that his 1829 letterrecording Buddhist residents in Bombay City but no Jains was written whenhe was in India not longer than eleven months; and since he spent his firstnine months in the southern Konkan – a region with few Jains – the letter wasdoubtlessly composed before he had much, if any, contact with Jains and littleexperience living in Bombay City. Consequently, it is reasonable to concludethat the 1829 letter was written before Wilson began to differentiate Jains fromBuddhists and that the Buddhists he claimed were resident in the Bombay werepeople he would later identify as Jain.

Not only did the Bombay Scottish missionaries conceptualise the religionof the Jains as distinct from Buddhism, but they also unambiguously positedthe the Jain religion as an independent religion distinct from Hinduism. Theirexperience of witnessing nineteenth-century Jains criticising and ridiculing theBrahmanical scriptures surely buttressed (and probably informed) their view thatthe Jains were not Hindus. Notwithstanding the fact that Wilson was aware thatJains often maintained an identity as Vaishyas and Kshatriyas and that Brahminssometimes functioned as Jain subordinate ministers, apart from possibly one singleuncharacteristic and very problematic reference in the records of the BombayScottish missionaries, I know of no instance in which they referred to the religionof the Jains as Hinduism or the Hindu religion.126

The single reference that may prima facie seem to indicate that Wilsonconsidered Jains as Hindus comes from his 1876 ‘Jainas’ which contains a referenceto Jains as ‘other Hindus.’ When this single reference is examined and situatedwithin its specific context, however, one realises that Wilson did not mean to saythat the Jains were Hindus and that the religion of the Jains was Hinduism. Thestatement in question was made in the context of and in specific reference to the1873 Bombay High Court case of Bhagvandas Tejmal v. Rajmal – which was ‘asuccession dispute within a Marwari Jaina Agraval family involving a widow’s rightof adoption’– wherein Chief Justice Sir Michael R. Westropp determined thatJains were subject to Hindu inheritance law.127 Similar to his juridical functionin the 1862 Maharaj Libel Case in Tejmal v. Rajmal Reverend Wilson acted

125 Wilson, ‘Research Connected with the West of India’, pp. 507–10.126 Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency, p. 46.127 Flugel, ‘A Short History of Jaina Law’, pp. 5–7; Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes of the Bombay Presidency,

p. 46n.

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as the Bombay High Court’s expert witness on Jain and Hindu literature, lawand religion.128 Germane to our discussion is that while he testified that Jains‘derive their origin from Hindus’ and retain ‘the same laws of succession’ theynevertheless diverged from Hindus ‘in religion.’129

One fruitful means to unearth the ways in which the Bombay Scottishmissionaries conceptualised the Jains as a religious community and Jainism asa religion (especially in relationship to Hindus and Hinduism) is to examinedocuments in which they discuss the Jains and Jainism and other religiouscommunities and religions. Such an examination reveals no evidence that theScottish missionaries discussed or treated the Jains as Hindus or regarded thereligion of the Jains as Hinduism. Instead, they examine and treat Jains andJainism in relation to Hindus and Hinduism in essentially the same mannerin which they examine and treat Parsis and Zororastrianism and Muslims andIslam in relation to Hindus and Hinduism. In their publications Jains and Jainismare usually examined in their own sections or subsections of a particular textentitled – or exclusively focused on – Jains or ‘the Jain religion’ when those verytexts contain other parts, sections and chapters entitled or exclusively focused onHindus and the Hindu religion.130 Such an organisational structure ipso factosuggests that they neither believed that Jains were Hindus nor that the religionof the Jains was Hinduism. Not only does the structural organisation of theirpublications indicate their opinion that Jains were not Hindus but it also suggeststhat the Scottish missionaries perceived the same conceptual and differentialdistance between Jains and Hinduism as they regarded as existed betweenParsis and Hinduism and Muslims and Hinduism. In addition, Wilson’s reportsfrom the 1830s, which contained descriptions and enumerations of Bombay’sreligious communities – denominated individual classes of natives – attendingScottish mission schools, leaves no doubt that he identified the Jains as a individualgroup distinct from Hindus. In those reports he invariably classified Jains as areligious community separate from the much larger religious community labeledHindus. His 1832 report begins with the following sentence:

In discharging the duties of my office, I endeavour, as far as circumstanceswill 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 addressinga distinct religious community that begins with the name of the particular

128 See Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’, p. 477.129 C. Jackson (ed.), Bombay High Court Reports, Vol. X: Reports of Cases Decided in the High Court of

Bombay: 1873 (Bombay, 1874), pp. 256–7.130 See Wilson, ‘India as a Field of Missionary Enterprize’; Wilson, Evangelization of India,

pp. 226–51; Wilson, ‘Research Connected with the West of India’; Mitchell, Great Religions of India.131 Wilson, ‘Bombay Station of the Scottish Mission for 1832’, pp. 71–4.

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community examined. The report is an example of the manner in which theJains are represented and classified as no more Hindu than Protestants, RomanCatholics, Jews, Muslims and Parsis.

Conclusion

In examining Scottish missionaries’ representations of the Jains and ideas ofJainism, this article has sought to enrich and complicate our understandingof the European ‘discovery’ of Jainism, British depictions of the Jains and theactivities and ideas of Scottish missionaries in India. Scholarship on the ways inwhich nineteenth-century Europeans conceptualised or imagined Jainism (andinteracted 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 andthe work of the German scholar Herman Jacobi. As a result, the understandingof the British image of the Jains and conception of the religion of the Jains hasbeen largely the image and conception propounded by what Leslie Orr has called‘the Calcutta school of Orientalism.’133 Such an interpretation lends credenceto the claim that the publication of Jacobi’s 1879 Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu134

fostered a paradigmatic shift in how Europeans conceptualised the religion ofthe Jains – namely, the Jains were not a Buddhist or a Hindu sect but a distinctreligious community professing its own distinctive, recognisable and ancientreligion (Jainism).135 Hermann Jacobi’s identification of the nigganthas as Jainscertainly helped to reinforce and to disseminate the notion that Jainism was areligion distinct from Buddhism and Hinduism. The claim that Jacobi’s 1879 workinaugurated the idea that the Jains were neither a Buddhist nor Hindu sect andthat ‘the Jain religion’ was not heretofore deemed a separate independent religionis, however, negated by a close examination of the historical record. As I haveshown, Bombay-based Protestant missionaries such as John Wilson did not needto wait for Herman Jacobi’s 1879 Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu to conceptualise andrepresent the Jains as neither Hindus nor Buddhists nor to consider the religionof the Jains as a religion that was neither Hinduism nor Buddhism. The historicalrecord testifies to the fact that one did not need to identify the nigganthas with theJains to posit Jainism as a distinct religion.

132 J. Cort, ‘Introduction: Contested Jain Identities of Self and Other’, in J. Cort (ed.), OpenBoundaries: 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 Early20th Century’, Position paper for the workshop: The Jaina and the British: Collaboration and Conflict,Concealment and Contribution during the 19th and Early 20th Century, University of Tubingen, 19–20Feb., 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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Why did Scottish missionaries in nineteenth-century Bombay conceptualisethe Jains as a distinct religious community and Jainism as an individual religionbefore the work of H. Jacobi and in contradistinction to the earlier scholarshipon the Jains coming out of Calcutta? In this article I have proposed severalinterrelated and overlapping reasons. First, Bombay’s Jain population dwarfed theJain population in British India’s other regions. As mentioned, the 1881 censusnoted that Bombay’s Jain population was over 310 times greater than that ofBengal. That fact alone meant that the Jains received a kind of consideration inBombay that they did not receive in Bengal – a situation the historical recordconfirms. Second, partly as consequence of Bombay’s 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 JohnStevenson declared he attained by being based in Bombay rather than in Bengal.While it is uncertain whether Stevenson’s translations of the Kalpa Sutra and theNavatattava Prakarana were undertaken as a result of John Wilson’s 1836 appeal tothe BAS to translate Jain manuscripts it certainly accomplished the task he calledupon the Society’s members to carry out. The translation and publication of theKalpa Sutra, moreover, meant that at least by 1848 the Scottish missionaries wereable for the first time to examine in printed form (and in the English language)not only what they considered was a Jain sacred text but also, more significantly,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 religiouswork of Bombay’s other religious communities, the publication of Stevenson’stranslation of the Kalpa Sutra helped to foster and reinforce the notion that the Jainreligion, as an individual species of religion, was equivalent to and kindred withother religions. Third, the peculiar method through which the Bombay Scottishmissionaries sought to convert Indians necessitated obtaining an understanding ofthe manifold religions of Bombay’s heterogeneous population, which meant thatthey had an urgent and singular motivation to understand the religion of the Jainsthat the non-missionary scholars associated with the Calcutta school of orientalismdid not share. As a result, despite some of the confusion and inconsistency thatinevitably arises when a new conceptual scheme (for parsing the religions of theworld) supersedes an older scheme, Scottish missionaries in Bombay reified thereligion of the Jains into Jainism and began to conceptualise, write about andtreat the Jain religion as an independent religion distinct from Hinduism and evenBuddhism almost fifty years before the appearance of Jacobi’s 1879 Kalpasutra ofBhadrabahu. Fourth, we know that by 1832 John Wilson was aware that pre-modern Indian texts seemed to show that the acrimony he observed in Indiabetween (at least some) Jains and Hindus as to their respective religions existed inthe Indian past too. Fifth, Jains themselves informed the Scottish missionaries thattheir religion was different from the religion of the Hindus and in the presence ofthe Scots publicly rejected and condemned Hinduism.

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Mitch Numark

My argument that Scottish missionaries in Bombay were among the earliestBritons to conceptualise the Jains as a distinct religious community and Jainismas a separate individual religion is grounded in an examination of archival andpublished sources that have not previously been scoured for information related tothe Jains. That is a conclusion not only based on their specific accounts of the Jainsand Jainism but also on their accounts of what they considered Bombay’s otherreligious communities and India’s other religions. As I have argued elsewhere,only by a comparative examination of the ways in which particular individualswrote about and conceptualised several religions can one fully understand howthey conceptualised an individual species of religion.136 Max Muller may nothave practised what he preached but he was certainly on to something when hedeclared: ‘He who knows one, knows none.’137 In this regard it is both convenientand instructive that Scottish missionary sources discuss the Jains and Jainism alongwith a number of other religious communities and religions. An examination ofthese and other sources suggests that by 1832 Scottish missionaries in Bombaybegan to apprehend Jains as non-Hindus and Jainism as a religion different fromHinduism and even Buddhism.

An examination of the context or organisational structure of a specific sourcecan bring greater meaning to the specific source (and subject of investigation) andenable one to disinter significations embedded within the source’s organisationalstructure. As John Wilson’s 1835 report includes a schedule, which containsinformation in the form of grids and lists on Bombay Presidency’s Scottish missionschools, it is one specimen of evidence that can illustrate: (1) how the form of aparticular document can elucidate the document’s signification greater than thesum of its separate informational units of content and (2) how Jains and Jainismwere understood in relationship to Bombay’s other religious communities andreligions.138 In the schedule we find the following list of students:

• Protestants 8• Roman Catholics 40• Jews 8• Muhammandans 30• Parsis 3• Jains 27• Hindus 728

As this classification, like the classifying act more generally, functions in part asa visual and informational presentation of how taxa are perceived to be related,such a vertical and segmented list is itself not only an unambiguous demonstrationthat the Jains were classified as non-Hindus but also that the Jains were identified

136 Numark, ‘Translating Dharma’.137 M. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York, 1872), p. 11.138 NLS, MS 7531, J. Wilson to A. Brunton, 3 Oct. 1835.

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as similar to Hindus, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Parsis inthat they are all presented as distinct, exclusive and countable groups of people.

In the nineteenth century a group of scholarly inclined Scottish missionariesin Bombay came to conceptualise and represent Jainism as a distinct religionpossessing unique characteristics whilst also structurally isomorphic to otherspecies of the religion genus. These Scottish missionaries may have thoughtthey were explicating and analysing the Jain religion but at the same time theywere also reifying Jainism in such a way that made it more amenable to beingclassified as an individual species of religion. Classifying Jainism as a religionand Jains as a religious community together with other religions and religiouscommunities in tables, grids and sections of their publications was one concreteway in which they (1) reified Jainism into a religion-thing that was comparableand structurally equivalent to other religion-things and (2) configured and treatedJains as a religious community analogous to other religious communities. Oneshould not ignore, however, that the Scottish missionaries’ image of the religionof the Jains to a certain degree reflected – and was probably informed by – someof the ways in which some Jains themselves conceptualised and represented whatin the nineteenth century became known as Jainism.

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the scottish ‘discovery’ of jainism in nineteenth-century bombay

Documents

parame shvara che

royal asiatic society

early 20th century

oriental christian spectator

european orientalist circles

distinct religious community

scottish missionary society

roman catholic priests