Charming bouquet or wedding garland? The structures of the Jain heroine ‘novel’ in Prakrit From Kuvalayamālā (779) to Maṇoramā (1082) (original) (raw)
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Sanskrit tricks in the Jain grand narrative: discursive and literary devices in Jinasena’s Ādipurāṇa
Resisting and justifying changes II Testifying and legitimizing innovation in Indian and Ancient Greek Culture, ed. by Elisabetta Poddighe and Tiziana Pontillo. - Pisa : Pisa university press, 2023. – (Nuova biblioteca di Studi classici e orientali; 7), 2023
Jinasena’s Ādipurāṇa is a voluminous work from the 9th century CE, which along with its second part Uttarapurāṇa, written by Jinasena’s pupil Guṇabhadra in late 9th century CE, represents the Jain universal history genre built upon life stories of 63 illustrious men (Śalākāpuruṣa). Untypically for this genre of Jain texts, the work is not only written entirely in Sanskrit, the language of both Jinasena’s prior Brahmanical background and the Rāṣṭrakūṭa court at which he served under the protection of king Amoghavarṣa I1, but also employs a broad spectre of discoursive and literary devices characteristic of Sanskrit itihāsa-purāṇa, śāstra, and mahākāvya works. In Ādipurāṇa, several of these devices, representing the ruling Sanskrit culture, are synthesized and transformed in accordance with the distinctive aesthetics designed by the Digambara Jain author for the narrative illustrating the principles of his faith. The study aims to identify and describe them in relation to the primary purport of the work, which is an eulogistic explication of the Jain dharma. Its another objective is to present the Sanskrit narrative devices and their innovative synthesis constructed by Jinasena as a variety of grand narrative patterns, which implement large explanatory and normative schemes with the aid of persuasive techniques designed to create a sense of grandeur.
Jain Narrative Literature in Brajbhāṣā: Discussions from an Understudied Field
Religions, 2019
Jain narrative literature in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhraṃśa is rightly recognised as one of South Asia’s great cultural heritages and a vital source of material for insight into premodern Jain teachings, practices, and everyday life. However, Jain studies is yet to fully engage with the rich archive of Jain narrative literature in Brajbhāṣā, and a wealth of untapped manuscript material is waiting to be explored. In this article, I argue that by going beyond the too-broad moniker of “Jain Hindī literature” to recognise Jain narrative literature in Brajbhāṣā as a distinct category, we may better understand the Jains of early modern North India as partakers of a wider literary and religious culture. More particularly, by comparing the form and religious outlook of Rāmcand Bālak’s Sītācarit, a seventeenth-century Rāmāyaṇa treatment, with the works of the more well-known Banārsīdās, we see that even amongst the Jains who used Brajbhāṣā, considerable variety of outlooks and approaches existed.
The Ins and Outs of the Jains in Tamil Literary Histories
The Jains and their texts play a key role in the literary histories of the Tamil-speaking region. However, in their modern form, dating from 1856 to the present, these histories have been written almost exclusively by non-Jains. Driving their efforts have been agendas such as cultural evolutionism, Dravidian nationalism or Shaiva devotionalism. This essay builds on ideas articulated by the contemporaryTamil theorist K. Civatampi, examining how various models of periodization have frozen the Jains in the ancient past. Further, it will explore how this unfolding historical drama, which gloriously climaxes in Tamil literature, has attributed the Jains, as dramatis personae, merely a role in early Jain texts; their role as communities transmitting these texts has been ignored. In contrast to this typical pattern, this article will also introduce a literary history written in 1941 by the Jain A. Cakravarti Nayanar (1880–1960). It will explore whether or not his voice, which emerged from within the same academic community contributing to the strange absence of Jains in the contemporary awareness of Tamil literary, was successful in finding another way for Jains of being heard, and for non-Jains, of listening.
History at the End of History: Śrīvara's Jainataraṅgiṇī
This article focuses on the relationship between Śrīvara's fifteenth century Jainataraṅgiṇī and Kalhaṇa's twelfth century Rājataraṅgiṇī. Writing in the court of Sultan Zayn ul-'Ābidīn, Śrīvara relies on Kalhaṇa's work as the literary and theoretical model for the Jainataraṅgiṇī, but proceeds to adapt the form to reflect needs specific to a sort of biography of Zayn. I show that Śrīvara carefully orders and rearranges the events of the Sultan's life in order to create a narrative that largely follows the aesthetic and moral expectations articulated in Kalhaṇa's earlier Rājataraṅgiṇī. Yet despite Śrivara's attempts to make his own work philosophically conformable to that of his predecessor, the historiographical background implicit in the Jainataraṅgiṇī shows subtle shifts in conceptions of royal representation and the agency of fate. I argue that these shifts provide important clues to understand the specific moment in Kashmiri political and literary history made possible by a unique relationship between patron and poet. Śrīvara's Jainataraṅgiṇī shows the elastic possibilities of the Rājataraṅgiṇī form as it operates in the vastly changed political and social circumstances of Sultanate Kashmir.
Religions, 2019
Scholars have long known that Jain authors from the early centuries of the common era composed their own versions of the story of R¯ ama, prince of Ayodhy¯ a. Further, the differences between Jain and Brahminical versions of the narrative are well documented. Less studied are later versions of Jain R¯ ama narratives, particularly those composed during the early modern period. This paper examines one such version of the R¯ ama story, the fifteenth-century Sanskrit Padmapur¯ an. a by the Digambara author Brahma Jinad¯ asa. The paper compares Jinad¯ asa's work with an earlier text, the seventh-century Sanskrit Padmapur¯ an. a, authored by Ravis. en. a, as Jinad¯ asa explains that he has at hand a copy of his predecessor's work and is recomposing it to make it "clear". The paper thus demonstrates the multiple strategies of abridgement Jinad¯ asa employs in recomposing Ravis. en. a's earlier narrative and that, to Jinad¯ asa, this project of narrative abridgement was also one of clarification.
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2016
The Jain monk Jinaprabhasūri (1261-1333) was one of the most prolific intellectuals of early fourteenth-century India. This article analyzes one citrakāvya ('image-poem') stotra (hymn) and two ṣaḍbhāṣā (six-language) stotras in light of his other works on grammar and poetics (including his lost commentary on the Vidagdhamukhamaṇḍana). It argues that these genres of laghu-kāvya (short works of belles lettres) are best understood by examining their ideal sites of performance, the kavi-goṣṭhi or "assemly of poets." Examining the poems in light of the site of their performance helps us to understand the forms they take on, challenging notions that Jains were simply comfortable composing in Middle Indo-Aryan langauges and helping to shed light on why poets continued to compose citrakāvyas long after Ānandavardhana's (9th c.) dismissal of the genre as incapable of evoking rasa.
This paper focuses on the praśastis, "eulogies", which became a standard in Apabhraṃśa sandhibandhas, a literary style used almost exclusively by Digambara Jainas. It retraces the insertion of lengthy praśastis to Puṣpadanta's Mahāpurāṇu and, by looking at the works of Vibudha Śrīdhara and Raïdhū, it discusses its evolution to a means of social prestige for patrons. By indicating and analysing some of the information provided in these praśastis, the paper further explores their possibilities as historical sources, providing information about political, social, and religious history, for times and places of which other sources are sometimes limited.