The Lotus' New Bloom: Literary Innovation in Early Modern North India

Abstract

Situated at the disciplinary intersection of literature, history, and ethics, this dissertation is a comparative analysis of three Digambara Jain versions of the story of the epic prince Rāma: Raviṣeṇa’s seventh-century Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa, Brahma Jinadāsa’s fifteenth-century Sanskrit work of the same name, and Brahma Jinadāsa’s north-Indian vernacular (bhāṣā) Rām Rās. Two main questions lie at the heart of this comparative project. First, why did Jinadāsa feel the need to recompose a Sanskrit Rāma narrative? Jinadāsa is up front about the fact that his Padmapurāṇa is directly based on Raviṣeṇa’s earlier work, and the dissertation thus examines the literary changes that Jinadāsa makes to Raviṣeṇa’s text, framing these changes as a form of literary “adaptive reuse.” By comparing plot structure and narrative pace, trends in character development, and the use of poetic and technical language, I argue that while the actual events in the two narratives may be the same, Raviṣeṇa’s and Jinadāsa’s work employ different modes of moral instruction. Raviṣeṇa’s text is a kāvya, a work of high court poetry that utilizes classical theories of Sanskrit aesthetics to develop a sahṛdaya, literally “good hearted,” a learned man or connoisseur. Jinadāsa’s text, on the other hand, is best understood as an ākhyāna, or instructional narrative, that utilizes exemplarity as a tool for moral cultivation. The second question that this dissertation takes up is: how does a story change when composed in a new language? Specifically, I compare Jinadāsa’s Padmapurāṇa with his Rām Rās to understand the ways in which Sanskrit and bhāṣā literary production and dissemination complemented each other during the early modern period. In this section, I not only track the literary similarities and differences between Jinadāsa’s Sanskrit and bhāṣā texts, but further argue that the Rām Rās was meant to be publicly performed for an audience, and that attendance and participation in that audience reinforced notions of local community involvement and membership. This dissertation employs a comparative methodology that, drawing on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, focuses on textual difference. The distinctions between Raviṣeṇa’s and Jinadāsa’s Padmapuraṇas, on the one hand, and Jinadāsa’s Sanskrit and bhāṣā works, on the other, highlight each text’s work-like qualities, a term I borrow from Dominick LaCapra. While this work is an examination specifically of Jain literature, and thus contributes to discussions in the field of Jain studies, it simultaneously contributes to larger discussions about the historical processes of vernacular literary development in South Asia and the mechanisms by which religious texts work to cultivate moral persons.