Introduction

In seeking to bound and define the subject-matter of this volume, M. Carrithers and C. Humphrey have isolated five criteria by which the term ‘community’ can have analytical significance for any study of the Jains. These criteria represent both actors' and analysts' viewpoints and together present ‘community’ as a complex of features, rather than as a single analytical tool. In this chapter I wish to concentrate on two of the criteria – the sharing of a common culture, belief and practice and the consciousness of an identity as Jains – and the examine these within the context of an immigrant Jain community I studied in England.

The study of belief, especially religious belief, is fraught with difficulties, whether they be those that arise from trying to determine the specific content of a belief system, or those that surround the question of what it means ‘to believe’ at all (see Gombrich 1971, for example). Indeed, the problems attendant upon trying to define ‘belief system’ are analogous to those encountered in trying to define ‘community’. In this chapter I try to show that just as Jains themselves may be fragmented and divided, so the religion permits various interpretations which match divisions in a Jain ‘community’. Yet, just as Jain communities may, in fact, be ‘potential and imagined but by no means unreal’ (chapter 1, p. 12), so Jainism itself can exhibit a fiction of cohesion and inclusiveness which can serve to bind a fragmented community.