Jainism and Tamil

Jainism has a long history in the Tamil country. The Jains had a significant role in the formation of the Tamil script, including their great literary contribution. Despite this, most people were unaware of the presence of Tamil Jains and their connection to Tamil history. Many assumed, for instance, that Jainism and Buddhism were one and the same. To allay this confusion and ignorance, Mayilai Seeni Venkatasamy published Samanamum Tamilum (Jainism and Tamil) in 1954. The book is one of the earliest accounts introducing and explicating Jain philosophy, ethics, and doctrine to the modern Tamil reader. It traces Jainism’s arrival to the Tamil region, its growth, and its eventual fall with the concurrent emergence of the Bhakti movement. It talks of the persecution of Jains and their forced conversions to the Hindu faith, and Hinduism’s appropriations of Jain myths, festivals, and doctrines. Drawing from a variety of sources, including literature, inscription, sculpture, and temple architecture that has survived, perished, or metamorphosed into Hindu shrines, Venkatasamy resurrects the lost and largely forgotten Jain past of the Tamil country.

This English translation makes the work available to a global readership, inviting new perspectives on this two-thousand-year-old literary, cultural, and religious tradition, and its people. It hopes to inspire similar interrogations into various regional iterations of Jainism from other parts of the subcontinent, shedding light on how Jainism - or any religion, for that matter - gets localized and develops distinctive idioms in different socio-cultural landscapes.