What does it mean to worship beings that one believes are completely indifferent to, and entirely beyond the reach of, any form of worship whatsoever? How would such a relationship with sacred beings affect the religious life of a community? Using these questions as his point of departure, Lawrence A. Babb explores the ritual culture of image-worshipping Svetambar Jains of the western Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Jainism traces its lineages back to the ninth century B.C.E. and is, along with Buddhism, the only surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic religious traditions. It is known and celebrated for its systematic practice of non-violence and for the intense rigor of the asceticism it promotes. A unique aspect of Babb's study is his linking of the Jain tradition to the social identity of existing Jain communities.

Babb concludes by showing that Jain ritual culture can be seen as a variation on pan-Indian ritual patterns. In illuminating this little-known religious tradition, he demonstrates that divine "absence" can be as rich as divine "presence" in its possibilities for informing a religious response to the cosmos.

Lawrence A. Babb is Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College and author of Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in the Hindu Tradition (California, 1986).

"Babb’s work marks a distinct advance over many other fieldwork studies of the Jains which have paid insufficient attention to vernacular sources. For this reason, Absent Lord may well be the single most important of the fieldwork studies of the Jains published to date."—Religious Studies Review

"This book is an exploration of the ritual relationship that pervades the interaction between one branch of Jain devotees—Svetambars—and the sacred entities they worship. . . . Crucially, this succeeds in raising the understanding of the reader to the nature and meaning of the ritual and its implication for other areas of life of the Svetambar Jains. . . . This volume has something to offer a much wider readership keen to find out more about how religious rituals inform a community’s response to its place in the cosmos."—Asian Affairs

"Babb rightly belongs in the company of the most interesting American interpreters of ‘foreign cultures.’ . . . In Absent Lord he tops himself. He opens the Svetambar Jain cosmos to the reader and makes it palpable by careful attention to the rituals of the Jain religion."—Choice