Singing to the Jinas

Jain Laywomen, Mandal Singing, and the Negotiations of Jain Devotion

By: M. Whitney Kelting

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Hardcover | 2 August 2001

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Hardcover
288 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24 x 2.06

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While Western Jain scholarship has focused on those texts and practices favoring male participation, the Jain community itself relies heavily on lay women's participation for religious education, the performance of key rituals, and the locus of religious knowledge. In this fieldwork-based study, Whitney Kelting attempts to reconcile these women's understanding of Jainism with the religion as presented in the existing scholarship. Jain women, she shows, both accept and rewrite the idealized roles received from religious texts, practices, and social expectation, according to which female religiosity is a symbol of Jain perfection. Jain women's worship shows us a Jainism focused more on devotion than on philosophy. With rituals structured around singing hymns, Jain women negotiate hybrid theologies that sometimes conflict with normative Jainism. Singing to the Jinas describes these women's interpretations of their religion, not as folklore or popular religion, but as a theology that recreates Jainism in a form which honors their own participation.

Industry Reviews

"Kelting has written an exhilarating book that represents a model for any type of research involving both texts and field observation. The vividness of her descriptions, enhanced with photographs and English versions of stavans whose effectiveness is in no way diminished by translation, is such that on occasion I felt myself to be participating in an actual mandal performance. . . . This fine book should appeal to a wide scholarly constituency: Those interested in ritual and the relationship between women and religion in South Asia in particular will find much to engage them."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion

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