ABSTRACT

For many years, scholarship on the Jains paid too little attention to the historical, social and geographical contexts within which “Jainism” has always been embedded. The Digambar practice of becoming a renouncer through the formal taking of the vow of celibacy has been little remarked in scholarship on the Jains. This chapter discerns five frames within which the biography of Taran Svami has been contextualized: as Digambar mystic, as Digambar ritual reformer, as trans-sectarian iconoclastic sant poet, as miracle-worker, and as Jina-to-be. It provides Sitalprasad a framework for understanding the oftentimes abstruse writings of Taran Svami. Sangave went so far as to suggest that Taran Svami might have been influenced in his iconoclasm directly either by the teachings of Lonka Sah or Islam. As a result of the lack of a Taran Panth literary tradition, the history between the death of Taran Svami and the early twentieth century is largely a blank.