Medieval Jaina History and Prakrit Literature

Christine Chojnacki’s Voix et échos du roman-poème en prakrit is an in-depth study of eleven medieval Jaina Prakrit roman-poèmes (romance-poems or novel- poems). She argues that a fuller history of Indian kāvya literature needs to move beyond the standard treatment only of texts in Sanskrit to include Prakrit as well. Scholars have tended to ignore or dismiss these Prakrit texts. Chojnacki argues that this is a mistake that has had a deleterious effect upon the history of medieval Indian belles-lettres. Chojnacki’s book also addresses an important question of medieval Śvetāmbara Jaina history: what were the differences between the earlier monastic lineages that called themselves kulas and the later ones that called themselves gacchas? Almost all of the evidence scholars have used to investigate this topic has come from texts written by gaccha polemicists. The authorship of the texts Chojnacki studies is fairly evenly split between the two monastic styles. But neither an analysis of the content of the roman-poèmes nor the paratextual evidence coming from the authors’ prefaces and colophons supports the standard sharp division between the two. Instead we have a picture of the two coexisting for centuries, and the kulas only gradually disappearing for as yet still unknown reasons.