Ideality and Impossibility in the Contemporary Practice of the Jain Fast until Death

This dissertation is an ethnography of Jain women's moral and legal positions as “ascetic persons” in the contemporary practice of the Jain ritual fast until death known variably as sallekhana, santhara, or samadhi-maran. Asceticism and its inscription on the body form the central ideal of nonviolence in Jainism, saturating the texture of lay life and practice in which the ideal relation to the world is realized through complete withdrawal from it. Since the late 20th century, sallekhana-santhara among Shvetambar Jains has been practiced mostly by laywomen, leading to 2006 public interest litigation (PIL) claiming that sallekhana-santhara violates the constitutional right to life and constitutes criminal suicide. I foreground inquiry on how expressions of women’s agency and desire are woven into emergent forms of practice reflecting the expansion and (re)shaping of sallekhana-santhara in urban life, and anxieties around voluntary death as a feminine mode of ascetic practice. Taking up how this disposition is socially negotiated in sallekhana-santhara, the dissertation explores how Jains reconcile ideals and concepts outlined in scripture in life, and how singular fasts appear as intelligible realizations of ethical dying. In addition to a detailed original study of how sallekhana-santhara unfolds within complex social relations, this dissertation reexamines the fast’s ritual framing, exploring what the fragility of narrative and temporalities of the everyday tell us about Jain ritual. The dissertation traces historical forms of communal life and encounter that allow for sovereignty of individuals within their social worlds, progressing to conditions of state recognition of the ethicality of the ascetic mode which makes Jain life and death possible within families, attending ethnographically to intimate forms of ethical vulnerability within individual narratives and life histories. This dissertation draws from several years of fieldwork in Jaipur, Delhi, and Mumbai with Jain scholars, mendicants, and families and women from Digambar and Shvetambar Sthanakvasi, Murtipujak, and Terapanth sects of Jainism, as well as followers of Shrimad Rajchandra, bringing methodological insights on how to study a practice belonging to a diffuse and diasporic community, negotiating ethical demands of doctrine alongside sometimes incongruent obligations of kinship and community within shifting legal and political terrain