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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans fashioned new orientations for themselves through storytelling on all scales, from the most personal to the most official and public. Members of the opposition in the former German Democratic Republic were particularly successful in fashioning an authoritative official version of the East German past. To some extent such narratives, identifying victims and distributing blame, stood in place of legal processes, which were perceived as unsatisfactory. These official narratives, designated by the word Aufarbeitung, were understood to deliver an absolute form of truth, in contrast to deceptive public narrations practised in the GDR. The rhetoric of Aufarbeitung projected an attentive public which would receive the accounts, and an identification of that public with the German nation as a whole, even though the narratives were chiefly concerned with East Germans. These narratives were taken by some to amount to a metaphysically transcendent reality, History, circumscribing the horizons of human action. The moral value lent to this History was the greater because of an explicit contrast drawn between the long denial of a guilty past on the part of West Germans after the Nazi period, and the immediate Aufarbeitung undertaken for the GDR past. ; Tras la caída del Muro de Berlín, los alemanes del este elaboraron para sí mismos nuevas formas de orientación, sirviéndose de relatos construidos a diferentes escalas, desde los más personales hasta los públicos y oficiales. Los miembros de la oposición en la República Demócrata Alemana tuvieron un particular éxito en la construcción de una versión oficial autoritaria del pasado de la Alemania del este. A un cierto nivel, estas narrativas, que identificaban víctimas y repartían culpas, ocuparon el lugar de los procesos judiciales, que eran percibidos como poco satisfactorios. Estas narrativas oficiales, identificadas con la palabra Aufarbeitung, fueron entendidas como una forma absoluta de verdad, en contraste con las engañosas narraciones públicas realizadas en su día en la RDA. Aunque las narrativas estuviesen dirigidas principalmente a los alemanes del este, la retórica de la Aufarbeitung imaginaba un público curioso que, supuestamente, recibiría los informes, y se identificaría con la nación alemana como un todo. Algunos usaron estas narrativas para remontarse a una realidad metafísicamente trascendente, la Historia, que circunscribe los horizontes de la acción humana. El valor moral atribuido a esta Historia era máximo, a causa del contraste explícito que se dibujaba entre la prolongada negación de un pasado culpable, tras la etapa nazi en la Alemania Occidental, y el inmediato Aufarbeitung emprendido sobre el pasado de la RDA.

As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone to
choose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of business
associates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390

In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a 'small but select' group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, thedakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā.The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, while so many of the other associations in that lush growth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India have disappeared. It has been instrumental in forging a Jain ethnicity, in creating a new sense of a specifically Jain past and present, and in fostering new habits of education and of social intercourse among Jains. A good proportion of what is today taken for granted by Jains about southern Digambar samskrti, 'culture' or 'civilization', was moulded by Jains acting in and through the Sabha.

In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent events became known as 'The Bahubali Affair' (Marathibāhubalīprakaran).