The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Sweetmeats or Corpses? Art History and EthnohistoryAuthor(s): Michael W. MeisterSource: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 27 (Spring, 1995), pp. 118-132Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20166921 .Accessed: 02/07/2011 10:48

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118 RES 27 SPRING 1995

Figure 9. An eighth-century image of the calm goddess K?emankar? from the Saciy?m?t? temple compound at Osi?n

(probably the original image representing Saciy?m?t?). Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

Sweetmeats or corpses? Art history and ethnohistory

MICHAEL W. MEISTER

Art history is concerned with the life of objects. It

has most often focused on their makers and the

contexts in which they are produced. Scholars have

tended to assume that while history leads up to an

object and other objects flow from its making, what is

"objectified" has been frozen at the moment of making, thus becoming the proper study for research. George Kubier (1962) and Ernst Gombrich (1961) have, as art

historians, in quite different ways questioned how art

objects are linked together: Kubler in terms of

identifying "prime objects," Gombrich through a system

demarcating representational "schemata." Both see one

object affecting another, with art leading to art through time. Both see a process requiring that an object's

meaning and mechanisms be tested in relation to their

position in time. Neither, it seems to me, have

questioned the primacy or the unvarying reliability of

the object or maker at the moment of making. That the object also has a life after its making?that

a monument, painting, or sculpture can interact with its

users over time in ways significant beyond the

intention of its artist?has sometimes seemed to me

more a matter for the ethnohistorian than the art

historian. If the "intention" of the artist has always seemed a natural subject for the art historian, some

scholars instead increasingly have sought to define the

audience's "horizon of expectation." The phrase "horizon of expectation" was used first

by Gombrich in a limited sense to characterize "the

relationship between the expected and the

experienced" (1961:60).1 It has since been expounded into a theory by those German literary critics who have

attempted to formulate an "aesthetic of reception" (Iser

1978; Jauss 1982).2 Gombrich, in part, had suppressed such a "reception theory" by associating his "horizon"

less with the full expressive potential and social

functions of art than with the perceptual process alone.

Iser, however, praised Gombrich, saying that "at no

time does he separate representation from the

conditions of reception" (1978:90-91). He argues that

Gombrich's expansion of Gestalt psychology's categories of "schema and correction" had provided "the functional fecundity of [Gombrich's] model, for

the schema embodies a reference which is then

transcended by the correction."

Iser's interpretation of Gombrich, however, has not

fully separated the operational functions of audience

from artist:

Each schema makes the world accessible in accordance with the conventions the artist inherited. But when

something new is perceived ... it can only be represented by means of a correction.

. . . While the schema enables

the world to be represented, the correction evokes the observer's reactions to that represented world.

Paul de Man, in introducing Jauss (Jauss 1982:xiv), claims that "the procedure [of reception theory]

provides a model for the articulation between structure

and interpretation," differentiates the work from its

synchronie setting, and "inscribes" the work "in the

historical, diachronic motion of its understanding, which ends in the discovery of properties held in common between the work and its projected history." He points out that "at the moment of its inception, the

individual work of art stands out as unintelligible with

regard to the prevailing conventions." He goes on to

say, "The relationship between the work and its future

is not purely arbitrary. It contains elements of genuine

paradigmatic similarity that can circulate freely between the formal singularity of the work and the

history of its reception." If "reception theory" and "reader-response criticism"

have both gained considerable attention within literary critical circles in the past thirty years, setting up an

active interplay between "hermeneutics" and

"poetics"?between meaning and mechanics as de Man

defines them, or, in other words, between the practice of interpreting and the practice of making?I might still

1. Gombrich's A. W. Mellon lectures, which are incorporated into Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial

Representation (New York: Pantheon, 1961), were originally presented at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1956.

2. Iser (1978) cites Gombrich frequently but not specifically his

use of this phrase, which Gombrich himself does not develop or put in his index.

120 RES 27 SPRING 1995

point to de Man's cautionary warning within the

literary context (Jauss 1982:ix-x): "Hermeneutics and

poetics, different as they are, have a way of becoming

entangled, as indeed they have since Aristotle and

before. One can look upon the history of literary theory as the continued attempt to disentangle this knot and to

record the reasons for failing to do so."

If it has been the "mechanics of making" and the

"diachronic eminence" of the moment of making that

has most often formed the foundation for the art

historian's approach, the reception of the object and

the maker's calculation of that reception (or receptions) have played their part in recent art-historical dialogue. This is well summarized by Wolfgang Kemp's recent

review of John Shearman. Kemp (1994:367) writes:

Reception aesthetics escapes the fallacies both of formalism and of intentionalism if it conceives of the work and its surroundings, the text and its context, as

reciprocally interpreting entities, indeed if it demonstrates

that the text is as effective within its context as is the context within the text.3

My point, however, goes beyond the reception of a

fixed object in a series of contexts, but suggests that the

object itself forms a "series" as it interacts with different

contexts through time. Ethnohistory may mean many

things to its practitioners (Ohnuki-Tierney 1990; O'Brien and Roseberry 1991; Knapp 1992); but to me,

it must start with ethnographic evidence in the present and traces of similar evidence from the past (including

previous ethnography and historical data) and work

back through time's transforming patterns to represent or illuminate a past reality. Its virtue to me as an art

historian is that it can provide a rationale for seeing each slice in time, between an object's making and its

present use, as an equal reality ready to be studied (as in Davis 1992 and 1993).

Arjun Appadurai (1981:4-5), in his archival study of

one south Indian temple in the colonial period, has

helped to define appropriate parameters for an

ethnohistorical methodology, of which he wrote that it:

entails the analysis of all the traces, structural or cultural, that the institution under study has left on the past. But the collection of such traces, however minute and detailed,

would not constitute "ethnohistory/' but rather history, pure and simple. What makes it ethnohistory is its link to the

3. I would like to thank Jack Greenstein both for pointing out this

review to me and for his always interesting comments and

conversation.

present, to the cognitive and structural ways in which these traces have become compacted in the meaning systems of actors in the present.

Before him, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) had set a methodology of "deep description" in

ethnography that seemed to Appadurai to offer a

mechanism for his ethnohistorical study. Appadurai wrote that, given the "ethnohistorical premise" of his own study, "I hope to show how alterations in social

structure, over time, interact dialectically with a

fundamentally unaltered cultural system" (1981:6). The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1976; 1981),

on the other hand, in much of his work?and as he

phrases it in a recent article in RES: Anthropology and

Aesthetics (1992:21)?has emphasized that "'tradition'

is not static, nor is it in this way opposed to

'modernity.'" He cites Remo Guidieri and Francesco

Pellizzi's poignant observation that "in many instances . . . ethnic memory seems capable of reconsol ?dating

authenticity through mutations in form, so that the

current task of traditional societies appears to be the

recycling of ethnic memory through various forms of

cultural reinterpretation" (1988:26). In this way, in fact, the present forever extends the past.

Sahlins poses an anthropological thesis that "what

began as reproduction ends as transformation"?that

nothing remains "fundamentally unaltered"

(1981:67)?and writes: "The great challenge to an

historical anthropology is not merely to know how

events are ordered by culture, but how, in that process, the culture is reordered. How does the reproduction of a structure become its transformation?" (ibid.:8).

If "reception aesthetics" represents both a theory and a polemic, ethnohistory seems more a material and

pragmatic experiment with methodology. If reception

theory is overly self-conscious, ethnohistory has

remained somewhat unself-critical. Bernard Cohn has

pointed out in his encyclopedia essay outlining

"ethnohistory" that "there has been little effort to build

a body of generalizations, either through comparison or

through the development of concepts of categories of

sequences that would make interregional comparison

possible" (1968:441). Nicholas Dirks more recently has given the

following as his definition of ethnohistory: "the

reconstruction of an indigenous discourse about the

past" (1987:58; cited in Wagoner 1993:9). This goal, of

course, is as applicable to the Italian Renaissance as it

is to India. Cohn's cautionary comment that "in more

Meister: Notes and discussions 121

recent years 'ethnohistory' has come to mean the

historical study of any non-European peoples" should

be taken as a warning (1968:440). He ends this

excursus on ethnohistory (1968:446) by stating:

It is, however, in the study of the preindustrial and

modernizing societies of today and of the historical societies that characterized the whole world before the

beginning of the nineteenth century that the anthropologist and the historian would appear to need each other.

In my own field of Indian architectural history I have

written about the importance of the conservation of

archaeological monuments, but also of the nature of

India's own distinctive mechanisms for "preservation of

sacredness as a cultural resource" (Meister 1989). If I

have documented India's temples initially as an

archaeologist (Meister and Dhaky 1983-91), I have also

tried to point out that it is the institution and its

changing cultural consensuses and conventions that

constitute the monument, going beyond its architectural

forms (Meister 1990). TJrthas?that is, natural "crossing points" perceived

as liminal spaces (such as groves, river junctions, mountains, caves, and so forth)?define sacred places

in India. Pilgrimage links them. Monuments only mark

them. I have written of the archaeological conservation

of monuments that "conserving temples as artifacts conserves artifacts, but maintaining the sacredness of

centers [to fit the] institutional demands of patronage and pilgrimage is a difficult task" (Meister 1989:279).4

Increasingly, the field of Indian art history has had to move away from universalizing approaches to more

polys?mie ones in order to present and re-present the

multiple interpretations and contextualizations

embedded in the many layers still surviving in India's

past. Art history?in India perhaps even more than

elsewhere?increasingly may have to take on some of

ethnohistory's methodologies in order to create an

accurate understanding of the roles art has played within her many cultural environments (Meister 1988).

As an example of what I think can be done in my

field, I would like to summarize one recent case study of mine, that of the temple-city of Osia? situated on

the Rajasthan desert.5 At this site there are many

temples from several periods, some still used for

worship and others abandoned.6 Of these, the two

pilgrimage sites demand special attention.

One temple at Osia? is dedicated to the early Jain saint Mah?v?ra (fig. 1). It dates initially from late in the

eighth century A.D. (reformulated in A.D. 956 and with

still later additions). It is the oldest Jain temple

surviving in western India (Dhaky 1968:312-327; Meister and Dhaky 1991:182-189). This now serves as

the "mother" temple for the broadly disbursed merchant

community of Osv?l Jains (that is, Jains who trace their

origins to Osia?), some of whom still send their male

children to the attached Jain school (fig. 8) founded

about eighty years ago (Vashishtha 1988). This temple does not serve, however, as the "origin" temple for

Osv?l Jains?that is, to mark the point of a Rajput clan's origination, their "kul-devJ" shrine.7 That role is, at present, reserved for a larger pilgrimage temple

(fig. 3) dedicated to the goddess called Saciy?m?t? ("mother Saciy?") or Saciy?devT ("goddess Saciy?") set

on a hill of the same name just west of the village at

Osia? (Babb 1993:9-10). To the extended case study of these two temples I

have given the title "Sweetmeats or Corpses?

Community, Conversion, and Sacred Places," in

reference to the legend of this goddess's conversion

from Hindu to Jain practices of eating meat or

sweetmeats, which I shall recount shortly;8 but whether

India's art objects?in our museums or monographs? will be perceived by modern viewers as "sweetmeats"

or "corpses" must depend on the methodologies we

develop and apply to understand them.

In exploring the continuing role of the monuments at

Osia?, I chose to draw on three bodies of evidence:

first, the archaeological record of monuments and

inscriptions (Bhandarkar 1907, 1909, 1910; Nahar

1918; Dhaky 1968; Meister and Dhaky 1991); second, a seventeenth-century text called the Patt?valT of the

Upakesa-Caccha or the "list of pontiffs of Osia?

(ancient Upakesa) lineage" (Hoernle 1890); and third, a

4. See, for comparison, the recent translation and presentation of

Alois Riegl's 'The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its

Origin," Oppositions 25 (1982). 5. This is based on research presented first at a workshop on

"Jains in Indian History" at Amherst College, June 1993. It was given in this somewhat abbreviated and rhetoricized form for a panel

entitled "New Paradigms, Old Killings" at the sixth American

Committee for South Asian Art Symposium in New York, April 1994.

6. George Michell has published a site plan of Osia? (1989:301).

This is, however, not sufficiently accurate in placement, scale, and

orientation for reproduction here.

7. See the discussion of kul-devl shrines in Harlan (1992).

8. Seminar on "Jains in Indian History," Amherst, Massachusetts,

June 1993. A more detailed report on this research will appear in a

volume tentatively entitled Open Boundaries based on this seminar.

122 RES 27 SPRING 1995

?

Figure 1. Mahav?ra Jain temple in 1972. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

?ka? E?&

Meister: Notes and discussions 123

k

4KfsHfer ??ivimpiiv?MhE|^L. '

Figure 3. Saciy?m?t? temple in 1972. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

Figure 4. Bhandarkar's sketch plan of the Mah?v?ra temple's compound in 1904. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: Courtesy of Harvard College Library.

. !

"^^^flHHfl^^^Hr^'tii - * ? tS^: s'? t^*\ '

Wr^^fB

Figure 5. Mah?v?ra temple, fifteenth-century superstructure above eighth-century walls. The Saciy?m?t? temple is in the

background. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

124 RES 27 SPRING 1995

are integral to our understanding of these monuments

and that recent decades are as important as the

archaeology of past periods (fig. 6). The text involved, the PattavalT of the

Upakesa-Gaccha, was first published by Rudolf

Hoernle in 1890. Of the historical applicability of this text (or what he perceived as its lack of one), the

Jainologist Walter Schubring wrote "This fabulous

patt?valT. . . proves as an exception to the rule that

these chronicles are mines of reliable dates regarding the history of Jain Orders and writings" (1962:68).

Such a text, however, can preserve appropriations,

reappropriations, and reformulations as complex as

those found in the monuments themselves. It provides a series of embedded clues to significant periods of

transformation in the Jain community's perception of its

monuments as well as a fantastic and fabulistic account

of Osia?'s origin. The anthropologist Lawrence Babb

has named the various versions of this account he was

able to collect "the Osiya [Osia?] legend" in his study of today's Osv?l community in Rajasthan's capital city of Jaipur (1993:9). Babb cites myths as told to him by priests of the Saciy?m?t? temple in 1991 and from

printed sources, but he does not make the distinction, as Dhaky did two decades earlier, between

Brahmanical and Jain versions (1967:64). He describes the goddess Saciy? in 1991 as "a Jain goddess enshrined at a famous temple at Osiya, and clan

goddess (kul dew") to many Osv?l Jains" (Babb 1993:9, n. 9).

In addition to using my own observations and

interviews over the past thirty years, I have used those of D. R. Bhandarkar (1907, 1909), who, as an

archaeologist, visited Osia? early in this century (figs. 2, 4); those of M. A. Dhaky (1968), who visited in the

1950s; and those of my colleagues John Cort (1987; 1991; and personal correspondence) and Lawrence Babb (1993) in recent years, to form an ethnographic frame for changes in the Jain community's perceptions of, and relationship to, the Osia? monuments in this

century. Bhandarkar, for example, had recorded

Brahmanical rather than Jain versions of the "Osiy?

legend" early in this century, at a time when no Jains were living in Osia? (1907:36). He reported that

Saciyadev? was thought to be the "tutelary goddess of the [Hindu] S?rhkhl? Paramaras." Dhaky, in the 1950s, found that "Oswal Jains of Saurashtra [in the

neighboring western Indian state of Gujarat] have lost

[all] memory of the goddess at Osia" (1967:63). Babb, in the 1990s, found lay Jains in Jaipur turning

increasingly to Saciyadev? as a clan goddess in order to

il.m il.

sSS...., ; -?S ? > ^

Figure 6. Mah?v?ra temple, modem plan of main shrine,

restoring its eighth-century outline. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo:

? Michael W. Meister.

reinforce the R?jp?t nature of their community's conversion to Jainism centuries before (1993).9

Both the Saciy?m?t? and Mah?v?ra temples at Osia? have had interesting histories of use, transformation, and reuse (Meister 1989). The Mah?v?ra temple had been in the hands of its ritual priests (sevaks) for many centuries before it was returned to a committee of the

Jain community in this century. The present Osv?l Jain school was established only a little more than

seventy-five years ago (fig. 7), well after Bhandarkar's visit in 1906.10 The present priest at the temple, who

reports that he is a "Brahman, not Jain,"11 has identified

9. R?jp?ts are the warrior communities of western India

(Hitchcock 1959).

10. Personal communication from the pujan, Bhanuprakash

Sharma, in 1990.

11. Bhandarkar records that the pujar?s in the Jain temples in

Medt? were "of the sevak Br?hmana caste," and an inscription of V.S.

Meister: Notes and discussions 125

Figure 7. Jain school attached to Mah?v?ra temple. Osia?,

Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

the reestablishment of the temple and the founding of

the community school with patronage from a devout

lay Jain from the town of Medta-Phalod?, an account

supported in the Jaina Tirtha Sarvasangrah ("list of Jain

holy places"; Shah 1953), which recorded that no Jains resided in Osia? at the time of the school's founding, and that the temple was managed from the town of

Phalodi.12

The seventeenth-century Patt?valJ of the

Upakesa-Gaccha text is particularly useful in decoding and deconstructing the meaning of various periods of

patronage at Osia? in past centuries. Its formulation of

what Babb calls "the Osiy? myth" attributes the

founding of Osia? and its "ancient Jain temple" to a

person named ?hada, who, the text says, "migrated from a place called Bh?nmal with a large following of

Jain relatives and friends" (Hoernle 1890:233-234). Conversion of the Brahmanical population at Osia?,

however, this text associates with the arrival of a Jain

sage, Ratnaprabha-S?ri, with 500 followers who, as the

text says, "stayed for a month in the wilderness, and

wandered about in the exercise of their calling . . . but

did not obtain any alms, for the people who lived there

were unbelievers" (Hoernle 1890:236). ?hada's son,

1405 ordained that "only those Br?hmanas, who were descended

from Loke?vara" could serve in the temples of "P?rsvan?tha and

Phalaudh?" (1910:63).

12. According to Cort, this same family has served the temple for

the past three generations, or approximately 100 years (personal

communication).

poisoned by a snake, was brought back to life by

Ratnaprabha-S?ri, and as a reward:

at first [?hada] began to build a magnificent temple for

N?r?y?na [a form of the Hindu god Vi?nu]; but what he built in the day, fell in the night. He questioned all the

people who saw it; but none was able to suggest a

remedy. Then he asked . . .

Ratnaprabha the reason why

his temple fell down every night. The Guru [Ratnaprabha] enquired, in whose name he was building it. [?hada]

replied, in the name of N?r?y?na [Vi?nu]. The Guru

[teacher] said, "that will not do; make it in the name of Mah?v?ra [the Jain saint]; then you will succeed."13

The Paft?valf says that Ratnaprabha lived only seventy years after the early Jain sage, Mah?v?ra, whom

scholars place in the fifth century B.c. (Schubring 1962:38-39). Historically, however, this Ratnaprabha seems instead to have been a saint living in the twelfth

century A.D. (Hoernle 1890:234; Dhaky 1967:68). Neither date approximates the founding of either of the two pilgrimage temples at Osia?. The text does,

however, record intriguing details about Saciy?'s conversion to Jain ism that can help us to integrate the

text's "embedded history" with the archaeological and

ethnographic record.

In particular, the text helps us to separate three

different strata of goddesses in the myth of the town of

13. Most of the eighth-century shrines at Osia?, as well as the

tenth- and eleventh-century subshrines in the Saciy?m?t? complex, are dedicated to Visnu.

126 RES 27 SPRING 1995

Stew w ? w- ^^ SHHU^^BSr^^^^Pr^^^^^^H^^^^^^^^Hh**^^

Figure 8. The Saciy?m?t? temple-compound, as seen in 1990, set on a hill to the north of the Mah?v?ra temple. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

Osia?'s conversion to Jainism. The first is

Ratnaprabha's "tutelary" Jain goddess, who comes with

him to Osia? and gives him personal assistance (Cort

1987). The second is Saciy?-"m?t?" ("mother" Saciy?), a

local mother goddess first worshiped by the non-Jain residents in Osia? (Dhaky 1967). The third would be

Saciya-"dev?" (that is, "goddess" Saciy?), as an

embodiment of the Hindu Great Goddess. It is she

who, when converted to Jain worship, learned to

crunch on simple vegetarian sweetmeats instead of the

human corpses common to the Hindu myth (Hoernle

1890; Reu 1948). It is Ratnaprabha's tutelary goddess who tells him

that she has "begun to make an image of [the great Jain

sage] Mah?v?ra" (by dropping milk upon the ground)

'Worthy of that magnificent building on the hill .. .

towards the north of the temple" (Hoernle 1890:236). This seems a particularly ambiguous statement, given the geography of present-day Osia?. The eighth-century

Mah?v?ra Jain temple is located on the plain south and west of the Saciy?m?t? temple on its hill (fig. 8). Does

the text suggest that the Mah?v?ra Jain ?mage should be

worthy of an already existing goddess temple?

According to the Patt?valT, after the Mah?v?ra

temple's magical consecration, only "some of the

relatives" of ?hada were converted to Jainism (Hoernle

1890:237). Only then does Ratnaprabha say to them:

O ye faithful, [you] should not go to the temple of Sachchik?dev? [Saciyadev?]; she is merciless, and

incessantly delights in hearing the sound of the breaking bones and the killing of buffaios, goats, and other animals; the floor of her temple is stained with blood, and it is

hung about with festoons of fresh skins ... ; she is

altogether disgusting and horrible.

In fact, the original eighth-century cult image of the

goddess on the Saciy?m?t? hill seems to have

represented the Hindu "Great-Goddess" Durg? in a

transcendent and beatific mode (fig. 9) called

K?emaiikar? comparable in her erect yogic posture to

that of a Jain sage (fig. 11) (Dhaky 1967). It was only in ad. 1178, when the existing goddess temple on the hill

was built, that Saciy?m?t? was first represented in the

fierce form of Durg? as a warrior goddess slaying the

buffalo demon Mah?sa (fig. 10) (Dhaky 1967:66; Handa

1984:222). An inscribed image of Mah??amardin?

(Durg? as slayer of the buffalo demon) dated a.d. 1181

from the site of Jun?, donated by a Jain nun, calls her

by the name "Saccik?" (Dhaky 1967:69), and an

inscription of a.d. 1598 at Osia? recalls the story of

Ratnaprabha's conversion of Saciy?m?t? from an even

Meister: Notes and discussions 127

Figure 10. An image of a fierce form of the goddess, called Mah?samardin?, as slayer of a buffalo demon from the Siva temple at Bhund?n?, Rajasthan, ca. A.D. 825. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

128 RES 27 SPRING 1995

fiercer form of the Hindu Great Goddess called

C?mund? to the Jain practice of crunching on

sweetmeats rather than corpses (Reu 1948: 10). In the legend of Saciy?m?t?'s conversion, the

Patt?valT records that "the Dev? entered the body of a

maiden who was standing near, and thence replied, 'O Lord, I wanted one sort of thing to crunch and

munch, but you have given me another sort'" (Hoernle

1890:238).

By this merging of what A. K. Ramanujan (Cort

1987:249) has called "breast" (nurturing) and "tooth"

(fierce and protective) Mothers into the single clan

goddess, Saciy?m?t?, the "ambiguous duality" (Babb 1993:13) of the two communities?Hindus and

Jains?has been preserved. Saciy?m?t? is both Jain and not Jain, "breast" Mother and "tooth" Mother (figs. 9-10). Saciy?m?t?'s fierce rededication to nonviolence

Figure 11. An eleventh-century image of the Jina Parsvan?tha from the Mah?v?ra temple at Osia?. Photo: ? Michael W.

Meister.

is a statement about one community's conversion to

Jainism and its relationship to those around it. The

chronicle of the saints reads as follows:

The Goddess . . . said to her followers, "listen; whoever of

you shall worship the ?mage of Svayambhu-Mahav?ra ["self-existing," that is, the found rather than manufactured

?mage of Mah?v?ra], which is set up ?n the city of

Upak?sa, and shall follow the ?ch?rya [teacher]

Ratnaprabha, and shall serve his disciples and the

disciples of his disciples, with him I shall be well pleased, his evils shall I remove, and his worship I shall heartily accept." In consequence of these words of

Sachchhika-d?v? [Saciy?m?t?], ... a large number of

people . . . adopted the profession of Sr?vakas [followers] (Hoernle 1890:238).

The Patt?val? of the Upakesa-Gaccha?as well as the

archaeological sequence of monuments at

Osia??would seem to suggest not so much the mass

conversion of Osia?'s Brahmanical population to

Jainism as its gradual conversion and initiation into Jain

practices and rituals. The placid Ksemahkar? ?mage of

Durg? installed ?n Saciy?m?t?'s temple in the eighth century must have seemed not "other" enough to

emphasize this process of conversion by the twelfth

century (fig. 9). Fiercer forms of Durg?, such as

C?mund? or Mah??amardin?, could much more

effectively represent (as well as "re"-present) the local

goddess Saciy?m?t? as the goddess giving up corpses for sweetmeats when she was converted to Jainism by

Ratnaprabha-S?ri (fig. 10). The Saciy?m?t? temple's rebuilding in A.D. 1178,

with an ?mage of Durg? as the fierce goddess Mahisamardin? ?n ?ts sanctum, may thus have been meant ?n part to serve Jain purposes. Through the

"Osiya" legend of conversion this reformulation made

the temple available to both the Jain and Hindu

communities. We know from one inscription at Osia?

that, one decade later, the wife of a local landholder

named Yasodhara provided a shed on the Saciy?m?t? hill for a chariot for Mah?v?ra (Bhandarkar 1909:110). From another, dated A.D. 1190 (Handa 1984:47), we can confirm that Hindu Br?hmanas were then still

worshiping in Saciy?m?t?'s shrine, as they do today. The temple that verifies the earliest Osv?l conversion

from Hindu practices to Jainism is not Saciy?m?t?'s but

rather the one built for the image of the Jain saint,

Mah?v?ra, generated from a cow's milk falling on the

ground according to the text's story, and discovered by

Ratnaprabha-Suri's tutelary goddess (his s?sana devl). The Mah?v?ra temple, built at Osia? in the eighth

Meister: Notes and discussions 129

Figure 12. Saciy?m?t? hill, construction of one of nine new subshrines to form an outer ring around the compound, ca. 1992. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

century, demonstrates that a significant Jain presence existed in Osia? many years before the historically verifiable Ratnaprabha-S?ri could have visited Osia? in

the twelfth century. It may thus, indeed, have been the

rebuilding of the Saciy?m?t? temple, emphasizing its use as a Jain shrine, that Ratnaprabha-S?ri precipitated on his arrival at Osia? in the twelfth century.14

The history of Osia? doesn't stop in the twelfth

century, however. In 1906 Bhandarkar found that "no

Osv?l now passes at Osi? [Osia?] the night of the day on which he pays homage to the m?t? for fear of being overtaken by some calamity" (1907:101). A sense of this decline, and an excuse for it, is given in the

seventeenth-century Patt?val? text itself, where

Ratnaprabha's tutelary goddess proclaims that, as a

result of improper behavior by some of the community: "the town of Upakesa would gradually become

deserted, a schism would arise in the gachchha [Jain

lineage] and quarrels among the sr?vakas [worshipers], and the guilds would be disbursed in all directions"

(Hoernle 1890:239).

Today this is no longer the case. Not only has the

Mah?v?ra temple been reoccupied and restored but the

Saciy?m?t? temple also has, in recent years,

Figure 13. Saciy?m?t? hill, stairway to Saciy?m?t? temple with new dedicatory gateways. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

increasingly become a prime recipient of Jain lay patronage. The present pilgrimage shrine on the hill is still visited both by Hindus and by Jains, and its trustees are both Jain and Hindu, but the money for recent expansion has come primarily from Jain

worshipers.15 Nine new goddess subshrines are under

construction, ringing the older temple's compound wall

(figs. 8, 12); new facilities for pilgrims cover the hill; and a series of elegant gateways now march up the

staircase, each with its own set of Jain dedicatory inscriptions (fig. 13).

What I think we are seeing is specifically a

contemporary reclamation of Osia? by Jain pilgrims. The Mah?v?ra temple, now recognized within the Jain

community as western India's oldest Jain shrine, has in

15. Cort reports twelve such trustees, and that the puj?r?s are

"Saryupari Brahmans" (personal communication).

14. Dhaky comments that "the general atmosphere of the age

Ifavoured] non-violence under Jaina influence and [the] piety of the

great Jaina Sage may have ultimately helped compel the animal killers at the door of Sacciya to stop their violent acts" (1967:68).

130 RES 27 SPRING 1995

Figure 14. Mah?v?ra temple, sanctum. Osia?, Rajasthan.

Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

recent decades received substantial institutional support from the Anandji Kalyanji trust in Ahmedabad (fig. 15). It now receives as many as 20,000 jain visitors a year.

The Saciy?m?t? temple, on the other hand, has

increasingly been the recipient of lay patronage.

Saciy?m?t? has now changed?in relatively recent

times?from being a local personal goddess (s?sana

dev?) serving a variety of resident communities, Hindu

and Jain, into a much more specific, modern kul dev?, or origination goddess, for some of the Osv?l Jains,16 as

she had been early in the century for Hindu Paramaras

(Bhandarkar 1907:36). This recent patronage of the Saciy?m?t? temple fits

well into the "re-imaging" of present-day R?jp?t Jains

Figure 15. Mah?v?ra temple with new entry pavilion and

expanded open hall, ca. 1992. Osia?, Rajasthan. Photo: ? Michael W. Meister.

discussed by Babb (1993).17 The local warrior goddess present over many centuries and in many guises at

Osi?n, Saciy?m?t?, can well suit the current need by the lay Jain community in Jaipur for a "proper" warrior's

clan-origin (see also Hitchcock 1959). I might warn

that, contested and multivalent as history may be, it

would be unwise to conclude that such a

contemporary assertion reflects documentable history more than a community's present-day longing for an

"embedded" past. This kind of art-historical exercise has intertwined

several disparate types of sources to reconstruct a

history of Jain use of monuments at Osia? over many

centuries, including today. Is it art history or

ethnohistory? As a methodological challenge, I might end by citing Romila Thapar, India's great ancient

16. Babb refers to her as clan goddess "to many Osv?l Jains"

(1993:9, n. 9).

17. By "re-imaging" I mean the reassertion of warrior

characteristics by Jains who otherwise follow pacific 'Vegetarian"

practices, as documented in Jaipur:

These same acts of worship are also reassertions of a social past.

#ljains who set up shrines to saints as founders of their lineage]

belong to a community that sees itself as having come into

existence when warrior-kings learned to respect monks by being healed by monks. From that time forward, the two roles became

frozen: warrior-kings exchanged the protection of the swords they had laid aside for the protection of powerful ascetics (Babb

1992:20).

Meister: Notes and discussions 131

historian, from her article on "Society and Historical

Consciousness":

Each version of the past which has been deliberately transmitted has a significance for the present, and this accounts for its legitimacy and its continuity. The record

may be one in which historical consciousness is embedded [or it may refer to] more externalized forms. . . . [But there] is no evolutionary or determined

continuum from one form to the other and facets of the embedded consciousness can be seen . . . whether

introduced deliberately or subconsciously (1986:354-355).

Let us, as either art historians or ethnohistorians, crunch on that while trying to restore a sweet living

body to the corpse of art.

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Article Contentsp. 118p. [119]p. 120p. 121p. 122p. 123p. 124p. 125p. 126p. 127p. 128p. 129p. 130p. 131p. 132

Issue Table of ContentsRES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 27 (Spring, 1995), pp. 1-148Front MatterEditorial [pp. 5-10]Housing Fame: In the Tuscan Villa of Pliny the Younger [pp. 11-24]Legends of Llibal: The Development of an Ethiopian Pilgrimage Site [pp. 25-38]Hans Burgkmair's Depiction of Native Africans [pp. 39-51]Knowe Thyself: Anatomical Figures in Early Modern Europe [pp. 52-69]Reimagining the Grande Galleria of Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy [pp. 70-88]Inversion, Revolution, and the Carnivalesque in Rembrandt's "Civilis" [pp. 89-110]Notes and DiscussionsNage/danse, corps/criture: De l'insularit valryenne [pp. 111-117]Sweetmeats or Corpses? Art History and Ethnohistory [pp. 118-132]The Aesthetics of Value, the Fetish of Method: A Case Study at the Peabody Museum [pp. 133-145]

Back Matter