I\'m looking to try and run Jasper reports (that have been written in iReports and exported to xml) from within a python application, without having to communicate with a Jasper
Actually Jasper Reports are not implemented in Python, so the only way to have it serving to your Python code is to have Jasper Server running and awaiting Python requests over REST or other remote way of communication.
Simply - no way to have Jasper without Jasper (server) in Python