From Possession to Freedom- The Journey of Nili- Nilakeci

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I dedicate this book to my amma, Ramani. It is only because of her enthusiasm and help for an errant daughter and our hours of reading together that a small chapter in my doctoral thesis happened. My insistence that she simply 'read, and not interpret' must have been extremely difficult for her. It was only later that I realised how much her comments and insights had helped me. The hours my mother spent with me as we travelled with Nili on her painful journey and later Nīlakeci's scholarly journey, also reflected her own enthusiasm of spirit and her immense inner strength (especially in the years after my father passed away). In her death, back in September 2004, even before my thesis had taken final shape, I lost that joy that I would have seen on her face, holding a book that is for most part filled with her memory. What I do have, though, are the printed Nili tales and the book, Nilakeci, filled with the smell of her touch in each of its pages. Her new-found enthusiasm for Jaina history and literature - reading just about everything she could get her hands on, even before I had begun to read the first page-and, in particular, the texts the Tamil Jainas donated to me, but also archival material, such as inscriptions, was amazing. Like an enthusiastic child, she would tell people in our neighbourhood, even those who were quite uninterested, the Tamil Jaina story of persecution by the brahmins and by the bhakti tradition. Coming from the context that they did, my amma and appaji were rare people and they had a firm belief in their daughter's dreams. I dedicate this work to amma and her total trust in, and respect for, her daughter through most trying times.

This book owes itself to those moments spent with my mother.

1. JAINA LITERATURE IN TAMIL

It is important to know the trajectory of Tamil Jaina literary history in order to understand their ideas of the self vis--vis Tamil language and literature. For the Tamil Jaina community, Tamil has always been an intrinsic part of their identity. Though this book does not engage with this particular aspect; rather, it is about the text and characters, Nili and Nilakeci. Yet, if one were to remove the Tamil-ness from the Tamil Jaina construction of the self, an entire history of this minority, marginalized social/ religious group, would be deleted from the larger history of the Tamil country. It is in this sense that I locate the work called Nilakeci, which, being an ancient classic of Tamil literary tradition, has remained mostly unexplored, much like the history of Tamil vis-à-vis the Tamil Jaina community. So, in a sense, one is looking at a rare classic in Tamil, written by the ancestors of the Tamil-Jainas. And this at a time when debates and public discourses on 'religion'-(in a narrow sense) abound, without basic acceptance of even a possibility that the nature of reality could well be explained differently by different religious systems. At the same time, historically speaking, there wasn't always a romantic sense of camaraderie (peaceful co-existence') and 'democratic' (not in the political, but a philosophical sense) acceptance of others' points of view. There were also clashes and sheer animosity, at times. But still, the discourses happened, and some were long-drawn out (some, until date), such as the debate between the Buddhists and Jainas and even among or within the different sub-sects of the Jaina (Śvetambara-Digambara; northern-southern, and so on) communities. Thus it may appear that one is picking up a chapter from those episodes of the larger discourse on whether there is a god, or whether there is a soul or on what today seems more relevant, on the perceptions of nature and consumption, vectored as these debates were through ideas of ritual abstinence versus ritual excess or excess consumption and dominance of a tradition over the others. In this, the Buddhists and Jainas seem to have fought a losing battle which got confirmed by their becoming marginal over time while thought-systems such as those of the materialists or the determinists have as good as disappeared.