Tracking changes in Jain devotional singing

ABSTRACT

Over the last two and a half decades of research in the Śvetāmbar Mūrtipūjak Jain community in Pune, Maharashtra, I have been in a unique position to track changes in the ways that Jain devotional singing is performed. In order to discuss some observations I have made over these decades, I chose to track some notable consistencies and changes help illuminate the impact of socio-economic conditions on religious practices and musicality of the performances in the region. This chapter will contextualize the performance of one particular stavan, Śrī Śankheśvar Pārśvanāthnu Stavan, also known as ‘Antarajāmī Suṇ Alavesara,’ and examine how three performances of this stavan illustrate changes in the ways Jains perform devotional music over the last twenty-five years.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Chris Chapple and Niranjan Khalsa for inviting me to the conference, which inspired me to write this piece and to Niranjan Khalsa and Arvind-Pal Mandair for putting together this volume. I also want to acknowledge the generous funding of the American Institute of Indian Studies, which funded two long-term research trips to India and to the Unversity of Wisconsin for arranging for my Gujarati lessons setting this whole study in motion. Thanks to Dhamiben Shah, Niruben Shah, Sonali Shah, and the many other singers I have recorded over the decades who do not happen to appear in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Antarajāmī Suṇ Alavesara/ Śrī Śankheśvar Pārśvanāthnu Stavan’ (stavan, Gujarati, 4:06) performed by Niruben Shah, Madison, Wisconsin, 28 April 1992.

2. There are several words used to denote hymns within the Jain tradition: stavan, stuti, and stotra (and colloquially in Rajasthan, bhajan). Despite a confusing history of usage, these terms were each used differently among the contemporary Jains I knew. A stotra was a prayer to be recited, not sung; a stuti was an old prayer usually in Prakrit or Apabhramsa, which could be chanted or recited; a sūtra was usually a ‘fixed’ text (which the reciter cannot amend, append or emend – like the Kalpa Sūtra or more humbly the Khamāsamāno Sūtra) recited often from memory; and a stavan was a devotional song usually in Gujarati or Marwadi. The prayers for recitation within the caityavandan were usually referred to individually by their first lines; spoken of as a group they were the caityavandan. These prayers were called sūtras, except for the stavans sung in the second half. Even the Śakra Stava, which is mythologically and taxonomically seen as a stavan, was called the ‘Namotthuṇam Sūtra’ by Jains I knew. The women did know, though, that the Śakra Stava and the Namotthunam Sūtra were names for the same text. The taxonomy is further complicated by the use of terms differently within the texts themselves; for example, the term caityavandan refers both to the short prayer recited at the beginning of the series of prayers recited in the daily worship and to that series of prayers as a whole. (Kelting forthcoming)

3. The medieval period is marked by the rise of bhakti devotional poetry in North India. The Vaiṣṇav poet saints dominate the historical studies of this literary period: Mīrābāī (in Braj Bhāṣā), Sūrdās (in Braj Bhāṣā), Tulsīdās (in Avadhī), Jñāneśvar (in Marāṭhī), Tukaram (in Marathi), and Narsī Mehtā (in Gujarātī). Despite the extensive study of bhakti poetry in Hindu studies and the Jains’ participation in the bhakti school – ‘Jains participated in the culture of the sants, the poet-saints of medieval India, and like them produced devotional poetry in emergent vernaculars such as Hindi and Gujarati.’ (Dundas 2002, 94) – Jain poets remain mostly unstudied by Western scholars. However, when combined with a general lack of research on Gujarati sources (including – until Neelima Shukla Bhatt (2014) excellent study – its great saint-poet, Narsī Mehtā) it has left the Jain devotional or bhakti literature outside of the discussion, the conference, the collected volume, and the classroom, thus reproducing the marginality of the Jain texts which are, at the very least, a parallel development in the medieval period that has continued to evolve to the present.

4. According to Barbara Stoller Miller (1977), the pada usually have four to seven rhyming couplets, which use the first or second line of the whole poem as a refrain throughout. Following Jayadeva (and the South Indian bhakti poetry style which influenced Jayadeva), the padas are usually marked also by the poet’s name in the last line; while the poet’s name is included in the final line of some of the older stavan, it has been dropped from use in many of the newer ones.

5. Thompson (1987) remains the most comprehensive study of Gujarati folk music and, though he concedes that he did not examine Jain genres, he writes extensively about garbā.

6. It was not a dhoḷak (as people use in many forms of devotional music), but I have not yet been able to identify it.

7. Once, during 1993 Paryuṣaṇ while visiting many temples around Pune, I saw a women’s maṇḍaḷ near the Timber Market Jain temple where a woman played the harmonium while others sang or danced garbā.

8. I do not want to imply that the women, because they did not pay for music lessons or sign up with a music guru are untrained. The daily practice of devotional singing, during which many women spend hours perfecting their vocal techniques, is training, but I intend to say, rather, that one woman’s training does not mean that the ‘untrained’ are excluded from the performances.

9. Listen to Sheela Setiya. 1996. ‘Tarna Ho Tarna’ YouTube. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBZdoR9_EiM).

10. Listen to Anuradha Paudwal, Bhaktāmara Stotra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZY6kVsNwSQ).

11. ‘Antarajāmī Suṇ Alavesara/ Śrī Śankheśvar Pārśvanāthnu Stavan’ (stavan, Gujarati, 2:30) performed by Sonali Satish Shah, Pune, Maharashtra, 25 June 1997.

12. Listen to Puja Shah, ‘Antarajāmī Suṇ Alavesara’ Youtube video, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3hnFABqREo).