Surviving Images: Visualizing the Jain Fast Until Death
By Miki Chase. Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
This Research Reflection by guest contributor Miki Chase is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
As Sampat Devi’s cremation pyre burns behind us, her son hands me his phone. On the screen, a Jain nun bends over his mother, clad in white, administering the pachkhan or ritual vow that initiates sallekhanā, a voluntary fast unto death undertaken by a rare and venerated few Jains, members of the ancient South Asian religious tradition known as Jainism. As if caressing her image, his thumb rubs fingerprints from the screen before he slips the phone back into his pocket. Myriad such images circulate among Jains today in forms ranging from private, informal snapshots to public, formal memorialized displays, each operating as a fragment that survives the moment of death itself.
Intended to eradicate the karmic attachments that bind the soul to the cycle of death and rebirth, sallekhanā entails progressive abstention from food or drink, culminating in a vow to fast unto death. The arrangement of the practitioner’s body in the white garb of Jain ascetics, the gesture of folded hands marking ritual consent, the presence of a muni or sadhvi, a Jain monk or nun, to administer the vow and provide vaiyavach or supportive care, the placement of a rajoharan or monastic broom signifying non-violence: all constitute an easily recognized formal iconography of renunciation in the Jain soteriological imaginary. The fasting sādhaka or lay practitioner is located by these elements within a scene that renders their death an ascetic triumph in a historical succession of such heroic deaths. The controlled embrace of dying is a great ascetic accomplishment, leading to a wise, peaceful, and good death.
Videos and images of those undertaking sallekhanā function as more than family memories of the deceased, but as moral artifacts sometimes inscribed as socially legible markers of piety, accomplishment, or prestige. One man hung large, garlanded portraits of each of his deceased parents in his office, the photo of his father taken well before his death and of his mother after she completed her sallekhanā fast. Photos taken on phones are shared as daily updates on fasts in progress. Formal deathbed portraiture and video recordings of the full pachkhan granted by munis or Jain monks are shared between kin, transmitted in family or group chats, published online and in community printed newsletters, and presented to visiting mendicants.
Sallekhanā images like these organize Jain moral life around them. They function as what art historian Georges Didi-Huberman calls “surviving images”: visual fragments that organize absence into enduring visible forms through ongoing circulation. Surviving images suspend and carry forward the tensions and contradictions that structure sallekhanā events, maintaining heterogeneous temporalities, affects, and obligations simultaneously present within the image’s enduring form. As such, they condense the singular ambiguities of care, consent, and moral accountability in a given fast, rendering sallekhanā’s moral status durable and transmissible.
The surviving image is a fragment, a condensed trace of larger ethical, ritual, and familial processes that it cannot fully disclose.
What remains outside the image is equally decisive for how the death acquires moral coherence: negotiations through which permission was secured, the practitioner’s physical suffering, and differentiated attachments of family members occupying distinct positions of authority and care. The frailty of the fasting body also demands narrative supplementation, inviting kin to produce affirmations that secure the moral coherence and sacred quality of death’s ritual. Didi-Huberman reminds us that the fragment relates back to the whole only to question its status, inscribing a field of sacralizing signs that simultaneously stabilize and destabilize what is seen. Sacralization of the image offers an iconographically saturated surface to stabilize meaning that is otherwise unsettled by controversial social and legal ambiguities surrounding sallekhanā in questions of consent, coercion, and the ethical legibility of voluntary death. Even as these signs stabilize meaning, they therefore require interpretive labor through which families, communities, and institutions sustain the moral weight of the death, both for internal affirmation and for external justification amid legal, medical, and public discourses that challenge sallekhanā’s legitimacy.
The viewer of sallekhanā images is expected to cooperate and even collaborate in stabilizing ethical meaning through such visible forms. This is not accidental but constitutive of the images’ function. At stake is the ambiguity of whether consent was fully autonomous, whether kin authorized or orchestrated the vow, and whether the death represents ascetic triumph or moral liability. Circulating these images, families preserve memory and actively reproduce a moral order, rendering the deaths of their kin intelligible. The viewer who participates in narrativizing the image, or who receives it with reverence, helps resolve these tensions into a recognizable form of ritual legitimacy. The images’ survival individually and as an archive is not passive but performative, for they continue to enact and authorize the moral status of the sallekhanā death long after the practitioner’s body has been reduced to ash.
Miki Chase is Assistant Professor in South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds the Śrī Anantnāth Endowed Chair in Jain Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of religion, law, and gender in questions of care around death and dying in India, with a specific focus on Jainism.