SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The article argues that not only Jaina poetic fiction, but also the genres of Jain history, even ‘plain’ chronologies, are shaped by the imperatives of religious pragmatics. It demonstrates how through the rhetorical device of ‘communicative self-reference’, where a text points at its own communicative context, a variety of different Jaina narrative genres can function as conversion stories. A standard feature of Jain narratives is that the listener to a religious discourse frquently finds him/herself in a conventional speech situation, a sermon for instance, which mirrors the narrative frame in the text, and thus facilitates identification with the conversion experiences and soteriological trajectories typically highlighted in Jains texts. The article offers a solution for the conundrum of the frequent tropes of violence in Jaina stories by arguing that these are deliberately used to force conversational implicatures on the listener for the purpose of evoking experiences of religious insight, through techniques of defamiliarization, displacement, and the violation of expectations.