A world of learning: the journey of Padmanabh Jaini

Young Bites. Dated: 3/20/2019 11:52:57 AM


1998, while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, I befriended a scholar much older and far more learned than I. This was Padmanabh Jaini, a great authority on Buddhism and Jainism, with a profound knowledge of texts in half a dozen languages. Jaini was gentle and understated, prone to reflection rather than argument or polemic. It is said that opposites attract, and this was certainly so in my case. Padmanabh Jaini is one of the two or three living scholars I most admire.
The professor has now published his memoirs, a slender work of 135 pages, entitled Coincidences (Yogayoga). This begins with his birth in 1923 in a Jain family of modest means in coastal Karnataka. His father was a village schoolteacher, his mother a homemaker who, remarkably for her place and time, published poems and essays in Kannada magazines. Among Padmanabh’s most vivid childhood memories are those of the temple of the thousand pillars in Moodbidri, built in the 15th century. As he writes, “[T]he most memorable event there was the laksha-dipa, held once in a while, when (at the drawing away of the curtain) a hundred thousand small oil-lit earthern lamps would glow, from both sides of the central image to the entire length of the inner shrine, giving us a glimpse of the infinite enlightenment (kevala jnana) attained by the Jina.’
Padmanabh grew up speaking Tulu and Kannada. His father taught him Hindi and some English, while his mother made him memorize the names of the tirthankars of the Jain tradition. His father had “high ambitions” for his son. At the age of 10, he was dispatched across the subcontinent to the town of Karanja, in Vidarbha, to join an ashram school that imparted the sort of education not to be had in his native Tulu Nadu.
Padmanabh matriculated in 1943, whereupon he proceeded to Nashik for his Bachelor’s degree. Here, a kindly Jain merchant appointed him warden of a boy’s hostel, where he had to instruct the kids in return for the fees required for his college education. In Nashik, he studied Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, with such diligence and dexterity that his principal said he must leave this “small provincial place” to make his name in a larger city.
The aspiring scholar’s next stop now became Ahmedabad, where, again, a munificent merchant offered board and lodging to see him through a Master’s degree. In this city that was once Mahatma Gandhi’s, Padmanabh learnt Gujarati on the streets and Pali in the classroom. He was now increasingly interested in Buddhism, and hoped to make a comparative study between the textual traditions of that faith and his own.
Padmanabh Jaini finished his MA in 1949. Gandhi had died the previous year, but, before his martyrdom, had asked for a scholarship to be endowed in the name of his friend, the Buddhist scholar Dharmanand Kosambi. A chance meeting in Bombay with another disciple of the Mahatma, Kaka Kalelkar, led to Padmanabh being chosen the first Kosambi scholar, and being sent to Sri Lanka to study Pali more thoroughly. While he was in Colombo a World Fellowship of Buddhists was held in that city. Among the delegates was B.R. Ambedkar, “who had announced on this occasion, to tremendous applause, that Buddhism was the only saviour for the caste-ridden Indian society”.
An appealing feature of Jaini’s autobiography is the acknowledgment of debts to his intellectual mentors. He presents loving sketches of his teachers in Tulu Nadu, Karanja, Kolhapur, Nashik, Ahmedabad, Bombay and Colombo, of their characters and styles of scholarship, and of what they taught him. There is a particularly fine portrait of Acharya Narendra Dev, who was vice-chancellor of the Banaras Hindu University when Jaini joined BHU as a lecturer in Pali in 1952. A close associate of Gandhi’s and of Nehru’s, a freedom fighter who spent many years in British jails, Narendra Dev was also a considerable scholar of history and philosophy. They don’t make politicians like him anymore; nor university administrators either. Narendra Dev gave Jaini the kind of nurturing care that is absolutely beyond the personal or intellectual capability of any vice-chancellor in India today.
Consider, for example, the careers of his great contemporaries in the American academy, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati. Both grew up in affluent, well-connected homes, and with easy access to the language of status and power, English. Sen was the son and grandson of university professors; named by Rabindranath Tagore, he was educated at the best institutions in India and the world, namely, Presidency College, Calcutta, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Born and raised in Bombay, Bhagwati was the son of a Supreme Court judge (and brother of another). He, like Sen, took an undergraduate degree at Cambridge. Both were mentored by famous international scholars; whereas Jaini was taught by men from the mofussil who, while both learned and devoted to their students, were not even well known within India.

 

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