These chapters discuss recent Jain institutions, particularly in the context of the modernising movements which swept through India in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The issues raised by all three chapters are: the extent to which the leadership in such institutions is founded on purely Jain criteria, the importance of the institutions, and the degree to which they depart from strictly Jain values. Do they indeed question the validity of the notion of ‘strictly Jain values’ in the present day?

In order to answer such questions we must have some notion of what Jain values are and what constitutes ‘primaeval’ Jain institutions. M. Carrithers chapter is the only one in this section to address these questions directly and in relation to a specific sociological reality. Readers should note that the level at which Carrithers is analysing the notion of community is twofold: (1) the experienced local community, as discussed also in J. Reynell, Howard Jones, C. Cottam Ellis and N. K. Singhi, and (2) the imagined sense of the larger community, a concept which is also mentioned by M. Banks. As M. Carrithers' chapter is also the only one to discuss the sociology of the southern Jains, we should sketch its critical features, as distinct from the north and west, here.