Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb and the Study of the Jains

The study of the Jains was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s when anthropologists and fieldwork oriented scholars in other fields turned their attention to contemporary Jain communities. Lawrence A. (Alan) Babb was a key person in this turn in Jain Studies, beginning with his fieldwork on Jain ritual transactions in Ahmedabad in 1986 and Jaipur in 1990-91, leading to his 1996 Absent Lord. For many of these scholars, fieldwork with Jains was their starting point in the study of South Asia. Babb, however, brought two decades of previous scholarship to his study of the Jains, having previously engaged in fieldwork on Hindu rituals in Chhattisgarh, Singapore and Delhi. This paper looks at this earlier scholarship, arguing the advantages for a fuller understanding of Babb’s scholarship on the Jains, and Jain studies as a whole, of situating Absent Lord and Babb’s subsequent scholarship on the Jains within this longer arc.