Kuvalayamala: Roman jaina de 779 compose par Uddyotanasuri, vol. 1: Etude; vol II: Traduction et annotations.

• Author: Dundas, Paul
• Position: Book review

Kuvalayatnala: Roman jaina de 779 compose par Uddyotanasuri, vol. 1: Etude; vol II: Traduction et annotations. By CHRISTINE CHOJNACKI. Indica et Tibetica, vol. 50/1 and 50/2. Marburg: INDICA ET TIBETICA VERLAG, 2008. Pp. 393 and 794.

During the first millennium of the common era Jain monks produced three remarkable Prakrit works which scholarship has styled either "romances" or, more daringly, "novels." Satighadasa's Vasudevahindi, Haribhadra's Samaraiccakaha, and Uddyotanasuri's Kuvalayamala (KM) are all extended literary creations blending erotic, marvellous, and religious themes and employing sequences of embedded narratives and subnarratives which enable the authors to connect characters over a large span of rebirths. Building upon the later narrative portions of the Svetambara agama where ornate kavyaesque passages became increasingly common, these Jain authors were able to stake out an autonomous cultural identity by using the techniques of courtly aesthetics to promote the values of their path in a Maharastri Prakrit which for several centuries vied with Sanskrit as the main vehicle for refined literature.

The most fully imagined and impressive of these works in terms of linguistic and stylistic amplitude and narrative emplotment is the KM to which can be assigned the remarkably precise date of 779. Its author Uddyotanasuri's sophisticated blend of prose and verse was greatly influenced by Bana's Kadambari and may even have been an attempt to emulate that great prose kavya. The KM itself, which modern readers might regard as in some respects akin to the fantasy literature which has flourished in the West in recent years, provided a model for subsequent Jain writers, and the work's status can be further gauged by its citation as agama by monastic intellectuals in the eleventh and twelfth centuries disputing over matters of correct practice and by the composition of a Sanskrit abridgement by Ratnaprabhasuri in the thirteenth century to ease access to Uddyotanasuri's masterpiece for an audience for which Prakrit was becoming increasingly intractable as a literary medium. Thereafter the KM seems to have fallen into obscurity, in part because, so the author of the work under review speculates, Uddyotanasuri is equivocal with regard to Hindu deities, who are not described with the censure appropriate to a Jain. It may also have been the case that a work which was startlingly original in its time may have come to seem old-fashioned amid the...