A Jain library steps gingerly into the 21st century

AHMEDABAD, India (RNS) The Gitarthganga Institute has over 125,000 books, manuscripts and ebooks. Five thousand books have been added to the digital database, along with thousands of ebooks, articles and photos.

Monks at the Gitarthganga Institute in Ahmedabad, in western India. RNS photo by Ellen Ioanes

AHMEDABAD, India (RNS) With its intricately carved marble walls, a Jain library known as the Gitarthganga Institute possesses an air of timelessness. It is tucked on a leafy side street, far from the shriek of car horns and auto-rickshaws that dominate the streets of this busy city in the western state of Gujarat.

But there is something decidedly 21st-century going on behind those walls. Gitarthganga is undertaking a massive enterprise — digitizing all its books and texts, some of which date back 150 years.

The library is, however, stepping gingerly into the new technological era since Jain monks and nuns, the guardians of the tradition, are not permitted to use cellphones and computers. Instead, 45 lay Jain employees and volunteers, including three coders, are toiling to bring the ancient tradition, best known for its commitment to nonviolence, into the modern era.


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The digitization project has been underway since 1992, according to Gitarthganga spokesman Shrenik Zaveri. But one can still visit the original texts, which are housed in glass cabinets on the upper floor of the temple.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights, monks, nuns and temple staff pull and re-shelve the books, all of which still have the old hand-printed Dewey decimal system labels.

Kushalkirti Maharaj Saheb, dressed in the white robes typical of Svetambara Jain monks, oversees the library and the digitization project. He’s a young monk, in his 30s, and a disciple of the guru Aacharya Shree Yugbushansuri. Before taking the vows, or diksha, Saheb worked as an IT professional.

Books in the library at the Gitarthganga in Ahmedabad, in western India. RNS photo by Ellen Ioanes

“We established this institution for subject-wise analysis,” he said, explaining that all of the books and manuscripts in the library have been divided into 108 main subjects (for example, meditation, or nonviolence) with 10,008 subheadings under the main topics.

“It is the first effort in India to digitize this way,” he said, explaining how the system allows users to search for terms and discover the entire Jain philosophy on that particular subject.

Gitarthganga has over 125,000 books, manuscripts and ebooks. Five thousand books have been added to the digital database, along with thousands of ebooks, articles and photos. The remainder will be added over the next decade or so, said Zaveri. While it may seem like a small number, it’s impressive considering the prohibition against the use of technology in the Svetambara monastic tradition.


For Jain monks and nuns to use a cellphone, computer or tablet is strictly taboo.

“The Jain understanding is that technology requires electricity, and the means of generating electricity are inherently violent,” said John Cort of Denison University.

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Gitarthganga is by no means the only Jain library in India; many mandirs, or temples, have their own libraries, with the Koba library in Koba, Gujarat, the largest and best-known. Because education and knowledge are highly valued among Jains (they are consistently among the best-educated minority groups in India), many temples have excellent collections of religious books and manuscripts.

Jainism is a somewhat obscure practice in much of the world. While it’s one of India’s oldest traditions, it has only an estimated 4.5 million practitioners (out of India’s 1.2 billion total population), and about 250,000 in the Jain diaspora, according to the World Religion Database.

As a result, many outside this small community have no knowledge of Jain principles, dietary practices or history.

The father of Jainism, Mahavira, was born between 599 and 540 B.C. and brought modern Jainism to the people of India as a rebellion against Hinduism.


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The religion has five core practices: Ahimsa, or nonviolence, is chief among them, as well as chastity, the prohibition on lying and stealing, and refrainment from materialism. Jains are vegetarians and keep an extremely strict diet that excludes root vegetables and eggs. They also fast often and have particular rules about when meals can be taken during the day.

The ultimate goal of practicing Jains is attaining moksha, or release from the cycle of birth and death. The monastic traditions practice extreme asceticism to achieve this release, including the prohibition on technology. They travel by foot, wear simple white robes (or in the Digambara tradition, no clothing at all), practice total abstinence and fast frequently, sometimes to death.

There is an impetus in the community to promote knowledge about the religion. And the Ahmedabad digital project is not the only such effort.

Pravin Shah, who started a Jain e-library in 2008, said he began the project as a way to bring religious texts to the next generation of Jains.

Shah, who practices Jainism and came to the United States in the 1970s, said no one in the U.S. had access to texts that would help them teach Jain children growing up in the diaspora. So he created an online resource to make such texts available, for free.

The project differs from Gitarthganga in that Shah works with a number of Jain libraries and scans their documents into his online database. The documents are not keyword-searchable, so navigating the database without prior knowledge of Jain texts can be a challenge.


The Gitarthganga Institute has developed a unique in-house software to facilitate the move to digital.

According to Yugbushansuri, who said he came up with the idea for this project 30 years ago, this resource is intended “for experts and scholars, not the common man.” Some of the library’s contents are in ancient languages such as Sanskrit, so “experts need to put the scriptures of Jainism in perspective for others.”

However, experts abroad have yet to make much use of it.

The Gitarthganga website does not contain access to the database itself. As to whether the information will ever be made available outside the institute, Zaveri said Gitarthganga will continue to work with Jain scholars throughout the world so they can “share their research.”

Still, Shah said he requested books from several different Jain libraries to add to his elibrary but was rebuffed by Gitarthganga because, he said, Gitarthganga hoped to keep its texts from being sullied by technology.

Even now, these resources are difficult to retrieve.

Peter Flugel, a scholar of Jainism at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, recalled that on a visit to the library, a student found 136 resources that would be useful for her work. Gitarthganga sent only seven via email due to what it said was a technological problem.

Flugel speculated, though, that the lack of access could be due to the politics of competing Jain sects. Different groups take on different community-oriented projects, each jockeying for recognition and supremacy, much like the kinds of intellectual competition between Ivy League universities.


“All of this can only be understood within the context of sectarian competition within Jainism,” said Flugel. “It’s a nice thing, they outdo each other in producing books and libraries and temples, all sorts of prestigious things.”

Yugbushansuri is confident that the resource will be helpful and that users will spread the good word about it.

Eventually, the texts will be translated into Hindi, and an English encyclopedia will be added. But Flugel and Shah both agree that the library will have “no choice” but to embrace the digital age and share the wealth of its knowledge so the religion can survive. Said Shah: “They have to change. There’s no other way.”

(Ellen Ioanes is a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Find her on Twitter @girlstothefront. A version of this story appeared at coveringreligion.org)

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