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Chapter Title: Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by

Seventeenth-Century Jains
Chapter Author(s): John E. Cort

Book Title: Tellings and Texts

Book Subtitle: Music, Literature and Performance in North India
Book Editor(s): Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield
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 2. Making it Vernacular in Agra:
The Practice of Translation by
Seventeenth-Century Jains 1

John E. Cort

Languages and Translation

In one sense, everyone “translates” all the time. Translation is simply
the basic interpretive process of rendering external data into terms
that “make sense” to a person. Even between two speakers of the same
language, the process of trying to understand each other involves a mode
of translation. Less ubiquitous, but still almost universal, is the process
of translating between and among different languages. As long as there
have been languages, people have had to cross the linguistic borders
between them. Everyday functioning in polylingual social settings
requires translation, the finding of rough and ready equivalencies and
similarities of meaning across languages so that one can engage in both

1 This chapter is based on research funded by two Senior Short-Term Fellowships from
the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1999-2000 and 2006-2007. All translations are
mine, unless otherwise noted. In addition to the many comments from participants
at the 2009 SOAS conference, I have benefitted from comments made in response to a
presentation of a version of this essay on a panel entitled “Translation in South Asian
History” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Philadelphia, 27
March 2010. In particular, I thank the following people for specific comments at the
two occasions, and after reading earlier drafts: Imre Bangha, Allison Busch, Walter
Hakala, Jack Hawley, Christian Novetzke, Deven Patel, and Gary Tubb. All errors of
fact and interpretation are, of course, mine.

© John E. Cort, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062.02

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62 Tellings and Texts

necessary and casual communication with others. For some people, this
process is elevated into a more consciously pursued practice. A person
works carefully and painstakingly to bring a text in one language—a
legal contract, a government document, a bill of lading, a poem—into
a second language. Issues of accuracy and precision become more
important. Greater control over both languages, the source and the
target, becomes a concern. Training and experience in translation may
be desirable skills on the part of the practitioner.
In some settings this practice of translation becomes a performance. The
tour guide, the pilgrim priest, the simultaneous translator at a diplomatic
conference, the person signing a speech or performance for hearing-
impaired members of the audience—each is performing translation. The
concept of performance can also be extended to the playful and painful
rendering of a powerful hymn from a classical language understood
by few into a vernacular tongue, so that everyone who hears or reads it
can appreciate and experience its beauty and influence. If the concept of
“practice” in translation emphasises the need for discipline and application,
the concept of “performance” reminds us that translation can be a virtuoso
act aimed at receiving the appreciation of an audience.
I advance these general observations about translation as everyday
experience, as practice, and as performance, in order to provide a
setting for the specific discussion that follows, in which I examine
the practice and performance of translation by a handful of Digambar
Jains in seventeenth-century North India. In addition to being poets
and translators, the men in question were businessmen, government
servants, and professional intellectuals. They engaged in translation as
part of their day-to-day life in the polylingual metropoles of Mughal
India. Due to their occupations and their interests, they also engaged
in the more explicit and formal practice of translation. Because the
particular texts that they translated were intended to reach and appeal
to a target audience of their fellow Jains, they furthermore engaged
in the performance of translation. To gain a fuller understanding of
seventeenth-century North Indian literary and intellectual culture,
therefore, it behooves us to pay attention to the widespread practice and
performance of translation in this culture, a practice and performance
that have hitherto been largely ignored by scholarship.
It is an obvious truism to say that India has always been multilingual.
In this, India has been no different than any other culture, as the

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 63

monolingual culture is an invention of the modern nation-state, aided

by print-capitalism.2 Languages and dialects (the difference between
the two also largely an invention of nationalism) changed within short
distances, so people inevitably needed to be able to shift language to
speak to others whom they met in a regional market or on pilgrimage,
when men left home for work, or in marriage negotiations. The languages
of governance were often different from the local vernaculars. Religious
languages—which we often term as “classical”—differed, often sharply,
from the vernaculars. Literary languages also differed from the spoken
vernaculars; the idea that literature should represent, if not be identical
with, the spoken tongue is another creation of modernity (and literary
high modernism). Commerce, military service, and religious mendicancy
all generated their distinctive forms of linguistic communication.
As I said, there is nothing uniquely Indian about this. However, when
one compares the cultural and intellectual attitudes to this multilingual
condition in India to those found in the European and Mediterranean
cultures that we loosely term as “Western”, there is a striking difference.
From the times of classical antiquity, and the first productions of Christian
scripture in Greek and Latin as opposed to the earlier Hebrew and Aramaic,
philosophers, theologians, and writers have thought long and hard about
what it means “to translate” from one language into another.3 One would
think that a culture in which language itself (vac) has a sacred presence,
and in which grammar rather than mathematics formed the foundation
for logic, would have generated a tradition of inquiry into the meaning and
possibility of translation. For most of Indian history, however, this has not
been the case. This is evident in the Hindī sāhitya koś (Dictionary of Hindi
Literature), edited by Dhirendra Varma (1963). In the first volume of this
massive work, totaling 997 pages, which is a glossary of literary terms
(paribhashik shabdavali), not a single entry is devoted to a discussion of
translation per se.4 This has continued into English-language scholarship.To
cite just two influential recent examples, in neither of the massive volumes

2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006, revised edn), pp. 67-82.
3 The best introduction to the philosophical and theological problems raised by
multilinguality and translation remains George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of
Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 2nd edn).
4 Hindī sāhitya koś, ed. by Dhirendra Varma, 2 vols (Varanasi: Jnanmandal Limited,
1963).

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64 Tellings and Texts

by Sheldon Pollock on South Asian literary cultures, totalling some 1,600

pages, is translation a topic of analysis.5
In part this is a reflection of a broader cultural and academic devaluation
of translation and translators, which has led to what Lawrence Venuti has
called “the translator’s invisibility”.6 Publishers often either omit the name
of a translator, or bury it in fine print on the copyright page. Academic
tenure and promotion committees place little if any weight on translation as
evidence of “real” scholarly activity. This neglect extends into scholarship,
as it is common to find detailed studies of important authors in which scant
attention is paid to those author’s translations. The major biography of
Banarsidas, for example, devotes only about one page out of 332 to his two
iconic translations.7 Translation is not considered to be “original”, and so
it is often dismissed as unimportant, uncreative, and ultimately derivative
and mechanical work.
There were some exceptions, of course, especially in the context of
religious communities such as the Jains and Buddhists. They developed
their own sacred languages, which acquired sacred status within the
specific communities; but they then had to come to terms with the
privileged status of Sanskrit in classical and medieval India as the pre-
eminent language of all intellectual discourse. Many Buddhist texts
such as the Dhammapada were translated from Pali into Sanskrit, and
the famous Buddhist translation workshops in China indicate that
the Buddhists had no ideological objection to translation. Further, the
number of Sanskrit and Pali texts that were translated into Chinese
multiple times indicates some level of concern for accuracy and
faithfulness in translation.
We can see possible tensions over translation expressed in the story of
the famous fourth- or fifth-century CE Shvetambar Jain monk Siddhasena
Divakara.8 He was a convert, from being a Brahmin to being a Jain monk,

5 Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2003) and The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).
6 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London:
Routledge, 1995).
7 Ravindra Kumar Jain, Kavivar Banārsīdās (Varanasi: Bharatiya Jnanpith Prakashan,
1966). For iconic translation, see the next section.
8 Phyllis Granoff, ‘The Biographies of Siddhasena: A Study in the Texture of Allusion
and the Weaving of a Group-Image’, Journal of Indian Philosophy 17 (1989): 329-84 and
18 (1990): 261-304; also ‘Buddhaghoṣa’s Penance and Siddhasena’s Crime: Remarks on
Some Buddhist and Jain Attitudes Towards the Language of Religious Texts’, in From

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 65

and from Sanskrit to Prakrit, but was still enthralled by Sanskrit intellectual
culture. He arrogantly offered to render the Jain scriptures, composed in
Ardha-Magadhi Prakrit, into Sanskrit.9 The other Jains were angered at the
proposal. They said that Siddhasena was implying that the enlightened
and omniscient Jinas, and their enlightened successors, had been incapable
of writing Sanskrit. Siddhasena, in their opinion, was therefore implicitly
doubting that very omniscience as well. The monks imposed a penance on
Siddhasena, who had to wander incognito for many years—in other words,
they rendered him symbolically speechless. This story does not deny the
possibility of translation, but rather criticises an attempt to elevate Sanskrit
to a position equal to Ardha-Magadhi. Granoff has rightly argued that the
main point of the story is to deny the Mimamsaka position on language,
which held that only Sanskrit is suitable for religious and ritual texts.10 Since
Siddhasena was a Brahmin by birth, the story also ties language usage to
socio-religious hierarchies. This is not primarily a story about translation
(or the impossibility thereof), but certainly indicates one socio-religious
context within which concerns about translation might arise.

Three Modes of Translation

At the centre of this essay is the analysis of “translation” as a text that in
its intention is not independently authored, but explicitly brings into the
new language a text previously authored in another language. If there is
a known author to the first text, the name of that author is attached to
the new text. This is what A.K. Ramanujan, borrowing terminology from

Benares to Beijing: Essays on Buddhism and Chinese Religion, ed. by K. Shinohara and P.
Granoff (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press, 1991), pp. 17-33.
9 In both the versions of the story that are available to me, there is no technical term
for “to translate”. Instead, Siddhasena simply says that he will make the texts into
Sanskrit, using a form of the Prakrit verb √kara and the Sanskrit verb √k, “to do, to
make”. In the Prakrit Ākhyānamaṇikośavtti (verse 57.32) of Amradevasuri, composed
in 1134 CE, Siddhasena says, “I will make all the scripture into the Sanskrit language”
(siddhantaṃ savvaṃ pi hu karemi bhāsāe sakkayāe ahaṃ). In the Sanskrit Prabandhakośa
(p. 18) of Rajashekharasuri, composed in 1349 CE, Siddhasena similarly says, “I will
make all the scriptures Sanskrit” (sakalānapyāgamānahaṃ saṃsktān karomi). I return to
the Indic vocabulary for “translation” below.
10 On this point see also Paul Dundas, ‘Jain Attitudes towards the Sanskrit Language’,
in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language,
ed. by Jan E.M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 137-56; and ‘Becoming Gautama:
Mantra and History in Śvetāmbara Jainism’, in Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and
Cultures in Indian History, ed. by John E. Cort (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1998), pp. 31-52.

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66 Tellings and Texts

Charles Sanders Pierce, has called an iconic translation, in which “Text 1

and Text 2 have a geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to
another”.11 Of course, a fully iconic translation is impossible, as theorists
of translation in many cultures have argued for millennia. A fully iconic
translation would in fact be nothing other than the first text itself. This
is the conundrum explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his famous short
story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”—a text which George
Steiner has described as “arguably… the most acute, most concentrated
commentary anyone has offered on the business of translation”.12 The
goal of Borges’s fictional author was not to “translate” Cervantes’s
famous novel, but “to produce pages which would coincide—word for
word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes”.13 Despite
its logical impossibility, however, the “faithful” iconic translation has
been the ideal of translators in European languages and Abrahamic
religious traditions for 2,000 years.
The other two types of translation in Ramanujan’s schema do not
aim for iconic faithfulness to the original. The first of these is indexical
translation, in which the new text shares the same basic elements of
plot, but differs in many specifics. This is what in Western classical
music might be called a “variation on a theme”. The other is symbolic
translation, in which the new text “uses the plot and characters and
names… minimally and uses them to say entirely new things”.14 This
takes us into literary texts and genres that push the boundaries of
any definition of translation, and are more often termed by scholars
as “adaptations”, “versions”, and “renderings”, and even, as I discuss
later in this essay, “commentaries”. If one expands the definition
of translation to include these latter two modes, then Indian literary
traditions have long been filled with translations. But the practice of
faithful iconic translation would appear to have been rare.

11 A.K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on
Translation’, in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed.
by Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 44.
12 Steiner (1992), p. 73.
13 Jorge Luis Borges, ’Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’, trans. Anthony Bonner, in
Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 49; cf. trans. by James E. Irby, in Labyrinths
(New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 39.
14 Ramanujan (1991), p. 45.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 67

Anuvad
The absence of any sustained thinking about translation is indicated in
the languages of India themselves. The word used most commonly in
contemporary North Indian vernacular languages for “translation” is
anuvad (anuvād, anuvāda).15 A look at the Sanskrit original indicates that
this usage is a modern one—created from the English to “translate”,
one can say, the word “translation” into Hindi and other vernaculars,
to describe a concept that wasn’t as fully present in Indian languages
as in European ones. In Sanskrit the primary meaning of anuvāda is “to
say after, to say again, to repeat”, as a means of explanation.16 Monier-
Williams cites Yaska’s Nirukta for this meaning. In the Brāhmaṇas, anuvāda
means “a passage… which explains or illustrates a rule (vidhi) previously
expounded”. Monier-Williams also cites “translation” as a meaning for
anuvāda, but gives no examples. I suspect this was a modern Sanskrit
usage that found its way into his dictionary as a back-formation from
vernacular usage. The term was also used in Sanskrit poetics: something
that was anuvāda-ayukta was an example that did not in fact adequately
explain a rule.17
The modernity of this meaning for anuvad is seen by looking at its
usage in several modern vernaculars. R.S. McGregor gives “translation”
as the second meaning for the Modern Standard Hindi anuvad, with
the first meaning being, as in the Sanskrit, the repetition of something
already said.18 He also indicates that “translation” is now the prominent
sense of the word; that a formerly secondary meaning is now the primary
one indicates a shift—probably relatively recent—in its usage.
Gujarati also indicates the recentness of the use of anuvad to mean
“translation”. Its first meaning in the Bhad gujarātī koś is “to say again

15 Winand M. Callewaert and Shilanand Hemraj, Bhagavadgītānuvāda: A Study in

Transcultural Translation (Ranchi: Satya Bharati Publication, 1983) pp. 75-77 and Harish
Trivedi, ‘In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms: “Translation” in India’, in Translating
Others, ed. by Theo Hermans (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2006), Vol. 1, pp.
108-16 for similar investigations of these and other Indic terms for “translation”.
16 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit–English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 1899), p. 38.
17 D. Varma (1963), Vol. 1, p. 62 cites the Sanskrit literary theorists Mammata’s
Kāvyaprakāśa and Vishvanatha’s commentary, and further adds that Mammata’s
formulation was brought into Hindi poetics by Bhikharidas in his Kāvyanirṇay,
composed in 1689 CE.
18 R.S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), p. 38.

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68 Tellings and Texts

what has been said” (boleluṃ pharī pharī bolavuṃ), and then the second
meaning is “translation” (bhāṣāntar, tarajumo).19 The two Gujarati
synonyms for “translation” further indicate the relative recentness of
the importation of the concept into Indian languages. Bhāṣāntar, literally
“other (antar) language (bhāṣā)”, is a tat-sama derivation from the Sanskrit
that sounds very much like a literal neologism. While it is also found
in Monier-Williams, he again gives no example of its usage in classical
Sanskrit literature.20 Tarjumo (Hindi tarjuma) entered the North Indian
vernaculars from Central Asia with the Persianate literary culture of the
Mughal and related courts.
Brian Hatcher has recently subjected the Bengali anuvada to a
preliminary historical investigation by looking at the usage on the title
pages of published translations of Sanskrit texts into Bengali in the
nineteenth century. He found that early in the century, Bengali authors
referred to their publications as saṃgraha bhāṣāte (“compiled in the
vernacular”) or bhāṣā vivaraṇa (“vernacular exposition”). While these
same authors when writing in English referred to the act of “translation”,
it was not until the middle of the 1830s that Bengali authors began to
use the term anuvada, and from then it rose to increasing prominence.21
It is clear that the vocabulary for translation as a distinct, nameable
practice is recent in South Asia. Does this mean, however, that translation
as a practice is something new? Is it yet another feature of modern
South Asian life for which we must attribute responsibility, for better or
worse, to the British colonialists?22 As I have argued elsewhere, before
we attribute changes in India to colonial influence, we need a clearer
understanding of India “on the eve of colonialism”, to borrow a phrase
from Sheldon Pollock.23 To attempt even to begin a history of translation
in South Asia is beyond the reach of this essay, for the materials for

19 K.K. Shastri, Br̥had gujarātī koś, 2 vols (Ahmedabad: Yunivarsiti Granth Nirman Bord,
1976), Vol. 1, p. 76.
20 Monier-Williams (1899), p. 755.
21 B. Hatcher, ‘Writing Sanskrit in the Vernacular: Vidyāsāgar, the Śāstras, and the
Reading Public’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian
Studies (Philadelphia, 2010).
22 Trivedi (2006), for one, takes such an ideological postcolonial stance, arguing that
importing the modern Indic terms into the emerging field of translation studies is to
do injustice to Indic languages and therefore Indic people.
23 John Cort, ‘Defining Jainism: Reform in the Jain Tradition’, in Jain Doctrine and Practice:
Academic Perspectives, ed. by Joseph T. O’Connell (Toronto: University of Toronto,
Centre for South Asian Studies, 2000), pp. 165-91; ‘Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the
Eve of Colonialism’, ed. by Sheldon Pollock, Journal of Indian Philosophy 30 (2002).

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 69

such a history have not begun to be collected. I do think, however, that

we can see one significant moment in a history of translation in South
Asia emerge in Agra in the seventeenth century. Let me now turn to the
details of this specifically Jain setting.

Religious and Literary Performance among

Digambar Jains in Seventeenth-Century Agra
The city of Agra was one of the centres of both political and economic
power during the Mughal era.24 Thousands of Jains migrated to the city
in response to the opportunities available there. Many of them occupied
positions at all levels of the Mughal administration. Others used the city
as a base for trading networks. They made Agra into a rich Jain cultural
centre as well. In 1594 Pandit Bhagavatidas made a pilgrimage to Agra
from his home in Ramnagar, and described the metropolis in his Argalpur
jinvandanā.25 He said that there were forty-eight Digambar Jain temples in
the city.26
Two of those temples were the seats of bhattaraks, the landed and
domesticated Digambar pontiffs at the apex of the Jain religious
community.27 Bhattarak Shubhkirti resided at the Tihuna Sahu temple, and
Bhattarak Jagatbhushan resided at the Sahu Narayani temple.28 Many of

24 My discussion here overlaps with that in Cort, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: On the Origins
of Digambar Sectarianism in North India’, in Multiple Histories: Culture and Society
in the Study of Rajasthan, ed. by L.A. Babb, V. Joshi, and M.W. Meister (Jaipur: Rawat
Publications, 2002), pp. 40-50.
25 Balbhadra Jain summarises the Argalpur jinvandanā on the basis of a single
unpublished manuscript in Ajmer; in Bhārat ke digambar jain tīrth, ed. by B. Jain
(Bombay: Bharatvarhiya Digambar Jain Tirthakshetra Kameti, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. 59-60.
26 By contrast, there were only thirty-six Digambar temples in 1974. Catherine Asher
has discussed the way that Jain temples and icons have mirrored the mobility of Jains
themselves in urban North India in recent centuries; ‘Urban Growth and Decline:
Housing the Moving Jina in Jaipur, Delhi and Lucknow’, Jinamañjari 34.2 (2006), 79-91.
27 There had been no naked Digambar monks (munis) in North India for several centuries
by the time of Mughal rule. The revival of the naked muni tradition began in the early
twentieth century; P. Flügel, ‘Demographic Trends in Jaina Monasticism’, in his (ed.)
Studies in Jaina History and Culture: Disputes and Dialogues (London: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 347-54.
28 The Bhattarak Jagatbhushan mentioned by Bhagavatidas was possibly the same as
the monk who was head of the Ater Shakha (branch) of the Balatkar Gana, as attested
by several icon, yantra, and temple inscriptions from Agra, as well as one manuscript
colophon; V. Johrapurkar, Bhaṭṭārak sampradāy (Sholapur: Jain Samskriti Samrakshak
Sangh, 1958), pp. 127-28. The inscriptions date from 1629 to 1638, so he must have
been a boy or very young man when Bhagavatidas visited Agra.

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70 Tellings and Texts

the temples in the city would have been affiliated with one or the other of
the two bhattarak seats, and the bhattaraks assigned ritual specialists known
as pandits or pandes to the temples under their control. These specialists,
who might be celibate (brahmachari) or married, oversaw and conducted
devotional and tantric rituals in the temples, and organised and supervised
the many annual celebrations of the Jain ritual calendar. They also engaged
in the production of knowledge: they wrote and copied texts in Sanskrit
and vernacular, and delivered public sermons on a regular basis. Almost
every Digambar temple in North India has a large courtyard—sometimes
covered, sometimes open—for the performance of congregational rituals
and for delivering sermons. Many temples also have covered verandas off
of the courtyards, where men or women can gather. There they perform
rituals involving the worship of icons (either portable metal icons, or stone
icons on subsidiary altars placed in the walls of the verandas). They gather
to sing devotional songs. They also engage in the study of texts, either by
themselves or under the guidance of a more learned person.
Balbhadra Jain has written of Agra during this period, “In the temples
there were scriptural sermons both morning and evening, and also
philosophical seminars [tattva-goṣṭhī]”.29 We can gain a better sense of these
cultural performances through the writings of Banarsidas (1587-c.1643). In
his autobiography, the Ardhakathānak,30 he wrote of a seminar that was held

29 B. Jain (1974), p. 59.

30 The Ardhakathānak [AK] has been translated into English thrice: in prose by Ramesh
Chandra Sharma (1970) and Mukund Lath (1981), and in free verse by Rohini
Chowdhury (2009). It has been translated into French by Jérôme Petit (2011). While
most early Hindi texts were written in verse, and so verse encompassed both the
prosaic and the poetic, Rupert Snell has argued that the craft in Banarsidas’s text is
such that it should be viewed as poetry, not merely verse. All translations of this text
in this essay are mine, unless otherwise noted; ‘Confessions of a 17th-Century Jain
Merchant: The Ardhakathānak of Banārsīdās’, South Asia Research 25 (2005a), 79-104,
and ‘Preface’, in Banarasidas, Ardhakathanak: A Half Story, trans. by Rohini Chowdhury
(New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. vii-xxii. Both Lath and Chowdhury include the
Devanagari text as edited by Nathuram Premi (1957). For ease of access, all references
are to the two reprints of the Devanagari text. There is extensive secondary literature on
Banarsidas and his times. In addition to the works above, see Bansidhar Bhatt, ‘On the
Epithet: Nāṭaka for the Samayasāra of Kundakunda’, in Jainism and Prakrit in Ancient
and Medieval India: Essays for Prof. Jagdish Chandra Jain, ed. by N.N. Bhattacharyya (New
Delhi: Manohar, 1994), pp. 431-62; Ravindra K. Jain, Kavivar Banārsīdās (jīvan aur kr̥titva)
(Varanasi: Bharatiya Jnanpith Prakashan, 1966), Jérôme Petit (2013), R.C. Sharma, ‘Life
of a Middle-Class Man in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Indian History 52 (1974),
389-403, and Eugenia Vanina, ‘The Ardhakathanaka of Banarsi Das: A Socio-cultural
Study’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, 5 (1995), 211–24.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 71

in 1635 under the leadership of Pandit (or Pande) Rupchand.31 Banarsidas

wrote, “Pandit Rupchand was well-known, and an expert on the scriptures.
He came to Agra. He stayed at the temple built by Tihuna Sahu. All
the spiritual seekers held a seminar, in which he lectured on a text, the
Gommaṭasāra”.32
This is the same temple mentioned by Bhagavatidas forty years earlier
as the seat of a bhattarak. Pandit Rupchand, therefore, must have been a
disciple of the bhattarak who oversaw the temple and its congregation.
Banarsidas referred to a circle of spiritual seekers (adhyatmis); we will
return to them shortly. This group was engaged in religious study. The
term Banarsidas used for this was bichara; and the modern standard
Hindi vicār-goṣṭhī is a term for seminar or symposium.33 The group took
advantage of the presence of this intellectual, who was well-known (guni)
as a scholar of the scriptures (agama-jana), and requested that he conduct a
course of study (banchayau; cf. Hindi vanchan, bachna) on the Gommaṭasāra.
This is a tenth-century text, written by Nemichandra, which provides a
detailed summary of Digambar doctrine.34 The seminar was a key event
in Banarsidas’s spiritual evolution. He described the effect of hearing
Rupchand’s exposition: “Pande Rupchand was an authoritative teacher; my
mind became happy from hearing the text”.35
Banarsidas gives us one more description of the way these seminars
worked. The text for which he is best known among Jains is his 1636
Samaysār nāṭak, a Brajbhasha indexical translation of one of the foundational

31 See Cort (2002), p. 73, n. 22 on Rupchand.

32 AK 630b-631; Lath (1981), p. 272; Chowdhury (2009), p. 264:
… nagara āgare thāna / rūpacanda paṇḍita gunī āyau āgama jāna //
tihunā sāhu deharā kiyā / tahāṃ āi tini ḍerā liyā //
saba adhyātamī kiyau bicāra / grantha bañcāyau gomaṭasāra //
33 R.S. McGregor (1993), p. 919.
34 The original of this text is in Sauraseni Prakrit. Banarsidas did not specify whether
Rupchand’s seminar was based upon the Prakrit original, or upon one or both
of the subsequent (and undated) Sanskrit commentaries, by Keshavavarni and
Abhayachandra Siddhantachakravarti. As I discuss below, I am suspicious of the
abilities of seventeenth-century Digambar intellectuals to read Prakrit without the
aid of Sanskrit commentaries, so I assume that the seminar was based on the Sanskrit
versions. A century later, the famous Digambar Terapanth intellectual Ṭodarmal
used these two Sanskrit commentaries to prepare the Samyagjñānacandrikā, his Hindi
commentary on the Gommaṭasāra; M. Mehta and H.R. Kapadiya, Jain sāhitya kā bhad
itihās, Vol. 4, Karm-sāhitya va āgamik prakaraṇ (Varanasi: Parshvanath Vidyashram
Shodh Sansthan, 1968), pp. 40-41.
35 AK 634c-d; Lath (1981), p. 272; Chowdhury (2009), p. 266:
pāṇḍe rūpacanda gura pāsa / sunyau grantha mana bhayau hulāsa //

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72 Tellings and Texts

texts of Digambar philosophy, the Samayasāra of Kundakunda.36 Banarsidas

had first encountered Kundakunda’s text three years earlier during a
visit to his wife’s natal town of Khairabad. This had been another crucial
turning point in his spiritual life. There he met a man named Arathmal
Dhor, who was an enthusiastic proponent of the two-truths doctrine
expounded in Kundakunda’s text. In Banarsidas’s words, Arathmal “spoke
enthusiastically” on the subject.37 Banarsidas went on to say that Arathmal
gave him a manuscript of a vernacular commentary on the Samayasāra
out of a concern for Banarsidas’s spiritual welfare (hita). Banarsidas read
(banchai) and studied (bhasha aratha bocharai chitta) the text on his own, but
was unable to come to an adequate understanding of it. Only after studying
the Gommaṭasāra under the guidance of Rupchand was he able to return to
the Samayasāra. In the Ardhakathānak he simply said, “Now I had attained
right faith, and knew the true nature of God. In 1639, with zeal and joy, I
composed the vernacular Samaysār nāṭak”.38
In the conclusion of the Samaysār nāṭak, Banarsidas gives us a longer
account of its composition:

The pleasant Samayasāra was read by pandits together with its Sanskrit
commentary, so they understood it. But the common people could not
understand its meaning. The Jain Pande Rajmall loved the Samayasāra, and
so he wrote a commentary on it known as the Teacher of Children [or Beginner’s
Textbook: Bālbodh] which was easy to understand. Thus conversation about this
wisdom spread. This became the doctrine of those who follow the Spiritual
[adhyatma] style. The Jina’s teachings became known everywhere, and people
talked about the Samayasāra in every household. It became famous in Agra,
and people became knowledgeable about it. Five skillful men began to talk
about knowledge day and night. First there was Pandit Rupchand, and the
second was Chaturbhuj. The third man was Bhagotidas [Bhagvatidas]. Then
there was the virtuous Kaunrpal. Together with Dharamdas they were five
men, who met and sat together. They would discuss the supreme truth, and
nothing else. Sometimes they discussed the Samayasāra, sometimes other
texts. Sometimes they would continue to discuss wisdom even after they had

36 The dates for Kundakunda, which range from the first through the eighth centuries CE,
have been the subject of extensive scholarly debate. See Bhatt (1994) for a discussion
of both Kundakunda’s Prakrit original and Banarsidas’s Brajbhasha translation.
37 AK 592a-b; Lath (1981), p. 269; Chowdhury (2009), p. 246:
taba tahāṃ mile arathamala ḍhora / karaiṃ adhyātama bātaiṃ jora //
38 AK 638-639a; Lath (1981), pp. 272-73; Chowdhury (2009), pp. 266-68:
aba samyak darasana unamāna / pragaṭa rūpa jānai bhagavāna //
solaha sai tirānavai varṣa / samaisāra nāṭaka dhari harṣa //
bhāṣā kiyau…

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 73

stood up [to leave]. … This work continued for many months—how many I
can’t say. It became known in Agra that a man named Banarsidas had a little
knowledge on the subject. The Samayasāra is beneficial, and the commentary
on it by Rajmall makes it easy to understand. If it were composed in metre,
everyone could read this vernacular text. So the thought came to Banarsi to
publicise these teachings of the Jina. He received permission from the five
men to compose it in metre.39

This passage gives us valuable insight into the cultural performance space
in which Banarsidas worked. While the professional intellectuals—the
pandits and pandes—were literate in Sanskrit as part of their training and
occupation, they were also expected to transmit the contents of the classical
scriptures in the vernacular, through both vernacular commentaries and
sermons. In the cases of the Samayasāra and the Gommaṭasāra, the linguistic
gulf between the original and the vernacular was even deeper, for both
of these texts were composed in Prakrit. It is not clear how fluent even
pandits and pandes were in Prakrit, and I suspect that in many cases they
relied extensively, and in some cases exclusively, upon the later Sanskrit
commentaries.40 The vernacular prose Bālbodh commentary on the
Samayasāra by Pande Rajmall (also Raymall), for example, was not based
on the original 415-verse Prakrit text, but rather on the Samayasāra kalaśa,
a 278-verse Sanskrit metrical commentary composed by Amritachandra
in about the twelfth century.41
Banarsidas then described a circle of five men who gathered to study
and discuss these texts. This was a trans-sectarian group of Jains who were
interested in the new style of religiosity known as Spirituality (Adhyatma).

39 Samayasār nāṭak, pp. 416-21. This translation is modified from the one I give at Cort
(2002), p. 46.
40 This is certainly the case in some contemporary Digambar settings. While the many
college-trained Digambar lay pandits demonstrate a high level of Prakrit fluency,
as a result of a widespread standardisation and improvement of Digambar pandit
training over the past century, many mendicants use Sanskrit almost exclusively
(in addition to the vernacular). In this they contrast with the liturgical familiarity
with Prakrit exhibited by Shvetambar mendicants. This seems to be a Digambar
pattern of some duration, as there are very few compositions in Prakrit from the past
half-a-millennium at least. Again, this is in contrast to the Shvetambar situation, in
which composition of at least short texts in Prakrit has continued to be an expected
occupational skill among mendicant intellectuals.
41 Bhatt (1994), p. 435. Rajmall was a professional pandit, and disciple of Bhattarak
Kumarsen of the Pushkar Gana of the Mathura Anvay of the Kashtha Sangh
(Nathuram Premi, Jain sāhitya aur itihās [Bombay: Hindi Granth Ratnakar, 1956],
p. 398). He was a prominent enough figure that he was possibly patronised in the
Mughal court of Akbar; Bhatt (1994), p. 450.

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74 Tellings and Texts

One of these, Pandit Rupchand, was another trained intellectual. He was

not the same as the Rupchand who had lectured on the Gommaṭasāra. The
other four were laymen. Banarsidas gave a striking description of the
intense nature of their discussions, when he said that even as they got
up to leave the seminars they would continue their conversations. Finally,
Banarsidas indicated that it was within the setting of this seminar that
he composed his own Brajbhasha rendition of the Samayasāra, basing his
text on Rajmall’s version of Amritachandra’s Sanskrit commentary. While
Banarsidas did not say this explicitly, I think we can read between his
lines to see that the final product was the result of his own study and
poetic skills combined with the critical comments and assistance of his
five companions.
Banarsidas’s Samaysār nāṭak in turn became a textbook for seminars in
Agra. In his colophon to the 1644 Banārsī vilās, the posthumous collection of
Banarsidas’s shorter works, the editor Jagjivan—whose family were divans
in the Mughal court42—mentioned a “circle of scholars” (jñānīn kī maṇḍalī)
that engaged in the study (vicāra) of Banarsidas’s text.43 Jagjivan included
in the Banārsī vilās the Jñān bāvanī, a poem written by the poet Pitambar in
1630 in praise of Banarsidas. In it Pitambar describes an assembly (sabha)
that sat together at the Digambar temple of Kapurchand Sahu under the
leadership of Kaunrpal and studied the writings (vachan) of Banarsidas:
“They sit happily in the Kapurchand Sahu temple. They sit in the assembly
hall (sabhā) where they meet for intellectual considerations, and study the
writings of Banarsidas”.44
The Jains in Agra did not just conduct seminars devoted to the details
of Digambar Jain philosophy. There were also poetic gatherings. In
India at this time the performance of poetry was a musical event. In his
autobiography Banarsidas recounted a time earlier in his life, in 1610 or

42 According to Gadadhar Singh, Hindī sāhitya ke vikās meṃ jain kaviyoṃ kī yogdān
(Muzaffarpur: Prakrit, Jain-Shastra aur Ahimsa Shodh Sansthan, 1994), p. 495,
Jagjivan’s father Abhayraj was a divan of the umrāṃv (umrao) Jafar Khan, who in turn
held the post of a 5,000 from Shah Jahan. Kamtaprasad Jain, in his Hindī jain sāhitya kā
saṅkipt itihās (Banaras: Bharatiya Jnanpith: 1947, p. 161) adds that Jagjivan succeeded
to his father’s position, as seen in a verse from the colophon to Jagjivan’s vernacular
translation of Kundakunda’s Pañcāstikāyasāra:
tākau pūtabhayau jaganābhī jagajīvana jinamāraganāmī /
jāpharakhāṃ ke kāja sambhāre bhayā divāna ujāgara sāre //
43 
Banārsī vilās [BV], Bombay edn, p. 252; Jaipur edn, p. 242.
44 
Jñān bāvanī 50a-c, in BV, Bombay edn, p. 88; BV, Jaipur edn, pp. 89-90:
khuśī hvai [hai] ke mandira kapūracanda sāhu baiṭhe /
baiṭhe kauṅrapāla sabhā jurī manabhāvanī //
bānārasīdāsa jūke vacana kī bāta calī /

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 75

1611, when as a young man his father had sent him from his birthplace of
Jaunpur to Agra to earn a living in trade. Banarsidas was not successful as
a merchant, but did gain some recognition for his poetic and singing skills.
He wrote that ten or twenty men would come to his room to hear him sing
Qutban’s Mirigāvatī and Manjhan’s Madhumālatī, two narrative mystical
poems composed in 1503 and 1545, respectively. These two classics of
Hindavi verse were composed by sufi poets on the basis of a heterogeneous
range of sources that included popular tales, and gave a mystical framework
to express the soul’s yearning for God.45 In this we see a foreshadowing
of Banarsidas’s later spiritual orientation. At this time, however, he was
more interested in love poetry, and this was probably what attracted him
to these texts.46 Mukund Lath has said of the Mirigāvatī and Madhumālatī
that “though allegorical in intent, these poems retained the poignancy of a
purely human passion, which accounted for their great popular appeal”.47
In the Ardhakathānak Banarsidas provides us with the details of his
poetic education, for in the seventeenth century as today, the performance
of poetry was a skill that required training and practice. It was common
practice for the sons of merchant families to be given basic education
in letters and numbers, as these skills were essential for their trade, so
Banarsidas was sent to a local Brahmin in Jaunpur. Banarsidas wrote, “As
a child of eight years I went to school to learn how to read. My guru was a
Brahmin, from whom I learned letters, reading and writing. I studied for
one year. Every day my knowledge increased, and I became proficient in
my learning”.48 For most merchants this would have been sufficient, but at
the age of fourteen Banarsidas studied with another local Brahmin teacher
in Jaunpur, a Pandit Devdatt. He engaged in a concentrated course of
higher studies. He studied astrology (jyotisha) and a work on mathematics,

45 For an overview of this genre see Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012b).
46 Banarsidas described a teenage infatuation in which “I was firmly in love with the
aching pangs of a Sufi fakir” (AK 171a-b; Lath 1981, p. 237; Chowdhury 2009, p. 72:
karai āsikhī dhari mana dhīra / daradabanda jyauṃ sekha phakīra //). Further, he reported
that when he was unable to give up his single-minded focus on love (āsikhī) and start
to earn a living, his elders sat him down and castigated him as a “dervish in love”
(āsikhbāja darbesa); AK 199d; Lath (1981), p. 239; Chowdhury (2009), p. 84. It appears
that for the young Banarsidas, sufi classics, and the core teachings of sufism itself,
were all about love.
47 M. Lath (1981), p. 177.
48 AK 98-99c; Lath (1981), p. 231; Chowdhury (2009), p. 44:
āṭha barasakau hūā bāla / vidyā paṛhana gayau caṭasāla //
gura pāṇḍe sauṃ vidyā sikhaiṃ / akkhara bāñcai lekhā likhaiṃ //
barasa eka lauṃ vidyā paṛhī / dina dina adhika adhika mati baṛhī //
vidyā paṛhi hūā birapanna /

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76 Tellings and Texts

the Khaṇḍasphuṭa. The rest of his studies prepared him to be a poet. He

studied two basic lexicographical texts: the Nāmamālā on synonyms, and
the Anekārthakośa on words with multiple meanings.49 He studied the
techniques of poetic embellishment (alankara) and also a text on erotics, the
Laghukoka.50 Banarsidas said that he spent an entire year in these studies.
During this period Banarsidas also engaged in studies of a more religious
nature, under two Shvetambar monks, Bhanchand and Ramchand.51 In
addition to doctrinal and ritual texts, he studied many Jain hymns. He
continued his literary studies at the same time. He learned metrics through
the Śrutabodha and the Chandakośa. Under the two monks he also continued
his study of other aspects of Sanskrit grammar. In the conclusion of his
autobiography, Banarsidas summarised his literary skills: “I can recite both
Sanskrit and Prakrit in a correct manner, I am skilled in various vernacular
languages, and I understand the nuances of words and meanings”.52

49 Scholars are of the opinion that the former, and perhaps the latter as well, were
probably the well-known texts by the ninth-century Digambar Dhananjaya; Lath
(1981), p. 160; see also P. Jain Shastri, ‘Prastāvnā’, in Nāmamālā of Banārsīdās, ed. by
J. Mukhtar (Sarsawa: Vir Seva Mandir, 1941), pp. 9-10. These two texts were usually
studied together.
50 Lath (1981, pp. 161-62) writes that this may have been a digest of the twelfth-century
Ratirahasya by Kokkoka.
51 Banarsidas by birth was a Shvetambar, and his family was affiliated with the Khartar
Gacch. He did not come to study Digambar texts and doctrines until much later
in his life. Only Bhanchand was formally a monk (muni); Banarsidas described his
disciple Ramchand as “still a youth, who wore householder’s clothing” (rāmacanda
bālaka gha bheṣa; AK 174b; Lath 1981, p. 237; Chowdhury 2009, p. 74). Nothing is
known of either of these two monks except that in Jaunpur in 1606 (six years after
Banarsidas studied with him), Bhanchand (known also as Bhanuchandra) composed
a Hindi Mgāṅk lekhā caupaī; Mahopadhyay Vinaysagar, Khartar gacch sāhitya koś
(Jaipur: Prakrit Bharati Akadami: 2006, p. 162). The story of Prince Mrigank was a
folktale adapted by Jain storytellers to narrate the virtues of donation to mendicants
(Gulab Chandra Chaudhri, Jain sāhitya kā bhad itihās, Vol. 6: Kāvya sāhitya, Varanasi:
Parshvanath Vidyashram Shodh Sansthan: 1973, pp. 312-13). Banarsidas expressed
his debt to Bhanchand as his “excellent guru” (suguru) in the introductions and/or
conclusions to three of his later compositions: the Ajitnāthjī ke chand, the Nāmamālā
(both composed in 1613), and the undated Praśnottaramālā. Banarsidas said that the
two monks were disciples of Upadhyay Abhaydharm of the Khartar Gacch. Nothing
is known about him, either; an Upadhyay Abhaydharm, together with Vachak
Nagkumar, composed a Hindi Daśadṣṭāntakathānak bālā (‘Easy Version of the Stories
of the Ten Examples’), but the 1522 date for this text would appear to be too early for
him to have been Bhanchand’s guru (Vinaysagar 2006, p. 84).
52 AK 648a-c; Lath (1981), p. 273; Chowdhury (2009), p. 270:
paṛhai saṃskta prākta suddha / vividha desa bhāṣā pratibuddha //
jānai sabada aratha kau bheda /
I interpret his statement about Sanskrit and Prakrit, as I indicate in my choice of
“recite” to translate paṛhai, to indicate that he could pronounce Prakrit correctly and
therefore recite it, but not that necessarily could “read” Prakrit, i.e., understand it

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 77

The result of this extensive study was that Banarsidas became a trained
poet. He composed a long Hindi poetic text of 1,000 verses in which he
explored all the nine rasas, but by his own admission the main focus was
only love: “I wrote a new book, in which there were a thousand verses.
The theme on which I wrote was the nine sentiments, but mainly it just
described love”.53
Banarsidas was sufficiently skilled that he was able to teach these
subjects. Several years later the governor of Jaunpur, Chini Kilic, who
was also an able vernacular poet, studied several of these texts under
Banarsidas’s tutelage.54
It was these skills that Banarsidas later brought to religious poetry.
None of his earlier secular poems survive, but there are a number of extant
religious poems that were collected soon after his death in the Banārsī vilās.
I think we can assume that these were composed and sung in the learned
circles of Agra in a similar congregational, cooperative manner as the
composition and study of his Samaysār nāṭak. Many of them come with an
indication of the raga in which they were to be sung.55

The Performance of Translation: Banarsidas

In all of this, there was nothing unique about Banarsidas, although the
rich detail he provides in his autobiography is largely unmatched for
the period. But there was something else about his literary endeavours
that was possibly ground-breaking: in addition to being a prolific

without the aid of a Sanskrit or vernacular commentary. I have followed Lath (1981,
p. 94) over Chowdhury (2009, p. 271) in my translation of the last section, concerning
words and meanings. Lath renders this, “In my use of language I am ever alive to
nuances of words and meanings”, while Chowdhury translated that he “knows the
distinctions between words and their meanings”.
53 AK 178cd-179ab; Lath (1981), p. 237; Chowdhury (2009), p. 76:
pothī eka banāī naī / mita hazāra dohā caupaī //
tāmaiṃ navarasa racanā likhī / pai bibisesa baranana āsikhī //
54 Lath (1981, pp. 184-85) gives the known information about Chini Kilic.
55 Mukund Lath (1981, pp. 197-98) has noted that Banarsidas does not mention
any musical training nor even any particular skill in music, and so argues that
presumably one of his companions was responsible for setting the poems to music.
But the inclusion of the ragas in many of the poems in the Banārsī vilās, coupled
with Banarsidas’s description of how popular were his singing performances of the
Mirigāvatī and the Madhumālatī, makes it more likely that he also received musical
training, but omitted any mention of it in his autobiography. It would have been
unusual at that time to be a trained poet and not have received musical training as
well.

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78 Tellings and Texts

author of original works, Banarsidas was a translator who produced

iconic Brajbhasha versions of classical Sanskrit texts.
Mukund Lath has written of Banarsidas’s autobiography that the
author “was evidently working without precedents” when he composed
a text in this new genre.56 We can say something similar about his work
in translation. Banarsidas composed five texts that we can describe as
translations, two of which do not fit easily into established indigenous
genres of translation in South Asia.
In several places in his autobiography, Banarsidas gave lists of poetic
texts he composed, often as a result of the religious turns in his later
life. The first was as a teenager in Jaunpur, while he was still studying
with Bhanchand, when he composed two texts that are now lost: his
thousand-verse erotic poem on the nine rasas, and a book on Sanskrit
grammar titled the Pañcasandhi.57
The second period was in 1613, during his first residence in Agra, in
his mid-twenties. He wrote two texts: the five-verse hymn Ajitnāth ke
chand, addressed to the second Jina; and a grammatical text on synonyms,
the Nāmamālā.58 While the first was an original composition, the latter
was the first of Banarsidas’s compositions that we can call a translation,
in this case an indexical translation.
In the period soon after 1623, and his first exposure to Rajmall’s
Bālbodh on the Samayasāra, Banarsidas became more influenced by a
spirit of aversion to worldly affairs (vairag bhav). During this time, he
composed several texts: the Gyān pacīsī, twenty-five verses on spiritual
knowledge; the Dhyān batīsī, thirty-two verses on meditation; several
mystical songs (adhyatam ke git); several miscellaneous songs in the kabit
(kavitt) metre;59 and a hymn entitled Sivmandir.60

56 Lath (1981, p. i); see also Snell (2005a) and Vanina (1995) on the Ardhakathānak as
autobiography.
57 AK 176-79; Lath (1981), p. 237; Chowdhury (2009), p. 76. Lath (1981, pp. 166-67), is
of the opinion that Banarsidas’s grammatical text was based on a fifteenth-century
“grammar-made-simple”, the Sārasvata vyākaraṇa of Anubhutisvarupacarya.
58 AK 386-87; Lath (1981), p. 252; Chowdhury, p. 160.
59 Lath (1981, p.198) writes: “The kabitta, a metre of four feet, each of 31 syllables, was
very popular with contemporary poets because it was excellently suited for exhibiting
virtuosity. Many one-verse poems of brilliant texture and compact design have been
composed in this form”; see also Bangha (2004), p. 33.
60 AK 596-97; Lath (1981), p. 269; Chowdhury (2009), p. 248. Jérôme Petit has recently
published translations of the Dhyān battīsī and the Karma chattīsī.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 79

Banarsidas’s text would lead the reader to think that all of these were
his original compositions. The last one, however, is another translation.
The Sivmandir is Banarsidas’s Brajbhasha iconic translation of one of the
most popular of all Jain hymns, the medieval Sanskrit Kalyāṇamandira
stotra of Kumudachandra.61 While its author was a Digambar monk, the
hymn quickly became popular among Shvetambars as well. In forty-
four verses, the poet praised Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Jina.
A few pages further on in his autobiography, Banarsidas gave another
list of more than a dozen texts that he wrote between 1633 and 1645,
when he was a mature writer living again in Agra.62 This list is also
deceptive, as mixed in among a number of original texts are two more
translations, one an iconic translation, the other an indexical one.
In 1633, Banarsidas finished the Sahas aṭhottar nām, or Jinasahasranām.
As its name indicates, this hymn is a eulogy involving the 1,000 names of
the Jina. Its ritual function as an auspicious benedictory text is indicated
by its location at the start of the Banārsī vilās. This was another indexical
translation. Also in this long list was the Sūktimuktāvalī, which Banarsidas
and his colleague Kaunrpal (also spelled Kumarpal and Kanvarpal)
composed in 1634. This was a Hindi iconic translation of a Sanskrit
poem of 100 verses by the medieval Shvetambar monk Somaprabha. He
composed the Sūktimuktāvalī, also known as the Sindūraprakara, in 1177.
It covers a range of topics in Jain devotion, practice and belief, in the
form of epigrammatic verses modeled on secular moral poems in the
niti genre.63
Finally, between 1635 and 1639, after he had studied the Gommaṭasāra
with Pande Rupchand, Banarsidas composed a number of works

61 Dhanki and Shah (1999, p. 23) estimate that the hymn was composed in the first
quarter of the twelfth century.
62 AK 625-29; Lath (1981), pp. 271-72; Chowdhury (2009), p. 262.
63 The Shvetambar editor, Pannyas Pradyumnavijaygani, says of the text, on page 4 of
his introduction, “Many monks and nuns memorise these aphorisms, and use them
in their preaching”. It is therefore quite possible that Banarsidas and Kaunrpal had
heard verses from the Sūktimuktāvali in their childhood and youth in the contexts
of sermons from Shvetambar monks. The title of the text is also sometimes spelled
Sūktamuktāvalī.
It is not clear when Digambars started to read it, but there are dozens of
manuscripts of Somaprabha’s text in the Digambar libraries of Rajasthan. Many of
them are accompanied with the Sanskrit commentary (Ṭīkā) composed in 1598 or
1599 by Harshakirti, a monk in the Shvetambar Nagpuriya Tapa Gacch. Since both
Banarsidas and Kaunrpal by birth were Shvetambars, it may be that the practice of
reading this text was brought by the two when they started to move into Digambar
circles in the middle of their lives.

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80 Tellings and Texts

in the spirit of Digambar mysticism (adhyatma).64 Among these was

his magnum opus of 1639, the Samaysār nāṭak. This was an indexical
translation of the Samayasāra, the great masterpiece of Kundakunda, the
foundational philosopher for the Digambar tradition. His last work was
his autobiography, completed in 1641. While he optimistically entitled it
“Half a Tale”, since he believed (despite all the evidence of seventeenth-
century mortality in North India) that at fifty-five years he was only half-
way through his life, he died soon thereafter, perhaps in 1643. Most of
his poetic works were collected into the Banārsī vilās in 1644 by his friend,
fellow poet, and fellow spiritual seeker Jagjivan.
Let me turn to a short analysis of Banarsidas’s five translations. My
goal here is not to render a judgment on these texts as translations in
terms of how faithful they are to their originals, nor on their qualities as
original writings. Rather, I want to investigate what they can tell us about
the practice of translation in the cosmopolitan literary cultures of North
India in the first half of the seventeenth century.65

Nāmamālā
Banarsidas’s first translation was written in Agra in 1613. In his autobiography
he wrote that he spent four months that year composing two texts. One of
these was the Ajitnāth ke Chand, a five-verse hymn, and the other was the
Nāmamālā. This was a lexicon of synonyms. He had earlier studied with
his Sanskrit teacher in Jaunpur a Sanskrit Nāmamālā—probably the famous
Nāmamālā of the ninth-century Digambar lay scholar Dhananjaya—and his
vernacular text was in some manner based upon the Sanskrit predecessor.
R.K. Jain and Mukund Lath note that Banarsidas’s lexicon was one of the
earliest texts of its kind in Hindi, being predated only by two lexicons
written by the Vaishnava poet and scholar Nanddas sometime in the latter
part of the sixteenth century.66

64 AK 630-39; Lath (1981), pp. 272-73; Chowdhury (2009), pp. 264-68.
65 In his article on Banarsidas’s Brajbhasha translation of the Kalyāṇmandira stotra, Luigi
Tessitori (2000, p. 310) briefly commented on the difficulties involved in translating
the Sanskrit vasantatilaka metre into the Hindi pad. Verse in the former consists of
long sentences made up of long compounds that are held in very clear (if complex)
grammatical relation through the inflected structure of the language. The pad, on the
other hand, is, in the words of John Stratton Hawley (2005: 32), “telegraphic”, so that
“one almost always has to supply a certain number of connections between words in
order to render their meaning intelligible”.
66 R.K. Jain (1966), pp. 135-39, and M. Lath (1981), p. 180. On Nanddas see R.S. McGregor,

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 81

To characterise Banarsidas’s Nāmamālā as a translation clearly stretches

any definition of this genre near to breaking point. He made no direct
reference to a Sanskrit original. He simply said of his text, “I compose
the accessible Nāmāvalī, for the sake of educating the beginner. I make a
river of vocabulary to illuminate the correct meanings. Banarsi makes it
in the vernacular, according to his own development and thought. I have
assembled various words from the vernacular, Prakrit and Sanskrit”.67
The notion that his text is based upon Dhananjaya’s is at best scholarly
conjecture.68 Banarsidas’s text is only 175 verses, whereas Dhananjaya’s
is 203 verses in length. Banarsidas perhaps inadvertently acknowledged
his debt to Dhananjaya’s text when in his autobiography he mistakenly
wrote that his Nāmamālā was 200 verses long.69 His statement that he
made vernacular a subject from the Prakrit and the Sanskrit for the sake of
educating the beginner (bāl vibodh) also locates this text within the field of
other “translations” which I discuss below.
The order of words for which synonyms are given is unrelated in the
two texts, and even the synonyms vary widely. For example, Banarsidas
started his text, appropriately enough for a Jain author, by devoting two
verses (4-5) to twenty synonyms for tirthankara. Dhananjaya, on the other
hand, did not come to tirthankara until verse 116, when in a single verse he
gave nine synonyms. Only five words are found in both lists.

Sahas aṭhottar nām/Jinasahasranām

In 1633, Banarsidas wrote another text that similarly stretches any definition
of translation. This was his Sahas aṭhottar nām or Jinasahasranām, a hymn in
which he gave 1,000 (or, more accurately, 1,008) names of the Jina. In the
beginning of the hymn, in wording almost identical to that found in his
Nāmamālā, Banarsidas wrote that the names in it are in vernacular, Prakrit

Nanddas, The Round Dance of Krishna and Uddhav’s Message (London: Luzac and
Company, 1973). Nanddas (verse 3: gūnthani nānā nāma ko / amarakoṣa ke bhāya //)
explicitly said that his lexicon was based on the Brahminical Sanskrit Amarakośa,
so the two vernacular lexicons tap into different classical Sanskrit lexicographical
traditions.
67 Banarsidas, Nāmamālā, verses 1cd-3ab:
racyauṃ sugama nāmāvalī / bāla vibodha nimitta //
sabada sindhu santhān kari / pragaṭa su-artha vicāra //
bhāṣā karai banārasī / nija gati mati anusāra //
bhāṣā prākta saṃskta / trividhi su sabada sameta //
68 Lath (1981), p. 160; R.K. Jain (1966), pp. 131-32; Jain Shastri (1941), pp. 9-10.
69 AK 387; Lath (1981), p. 252; Chowdhury (2009), p. 160: karī nāmamālā sai doi.

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82 Tellings and Texts

and Sanskrit.70 He varied the metres in the ten sections, each of which
contains 100 names and so is called a shatak. The metrical variety enhanced
the performance of the text in a temple setting.
Just as he no doubt consulted Dhananjaya’s text (and possibly others)
when composing his Nāmamālā, it is likely that he based his hymn in part
on one or both of two very popular Sanskrit Jinasahasranāma Stavanas,
and so it serves as an indexical translation, not an iconic one. Banarsidas
characterised his text at its conclusion as bhāṣā-jinasahasranām, so he viewed
it as the vernacularisation of an earlier textual tradition in classical languages.
The first Sanskrit text was by the South Indian monk Jinasena (c.770-850),
and was contained within his Ādipurāṇa, the most popular and influential
of all Digambar texts on the Jain universal history. The Jinasahasranāma
within this encyclopedic text has long circulated as an independent text.
The second was by the thirteenth-century lay pandit Ashadhara.71 Each of
the three texts consists of ten sections, but the titles of the sections differ,
as do the lengths of the texts in total.72 In other words, the Sanskrit texts
served as models for Banarsidas, and sources for many epithets, but he did
not set out to make an iconic translation of either Sanskrit text.

Samaysār nāṭak
As I noted above, the text for which Banarsidas is best known among Jains
is his Samaysār nāṭak. This is a translation of the Samayasāra of Kundakunda,
one of the central texts of Digambara philosophy and mysticism. With this
text we come a bit closer to what we might consider as a translation, even
if still very much in the indexical sense. It is unlikely that Banarsidas could
read Prakrit sufficiently to have used Kundakunda’s root text as his source.
Instead, his classical source was the Sanskrit Samayasāra kalaśa, written
in about the twelfth century by Amritachandra. As Bansidhar Bhatt has
explained, Amritachandra originally wrote a Sanskrit commentary on
Kundakunda’s text, which he entitled the Ātmakhyāti. The commentary

70 Sahas aṭhottar nām, verse 2: bhāṣā prākta saṃskta trividha śabda paramāna.
71 According to Nathuram Premi, in his “Nivedan” (p. 3) to his edition of all three texts,
in the early twentieth-century Ashadhara’s text circulated largely in Bundelkhand,
while Jinasena’s was found throughout the whole country.
72 Jinasena’s text is between 120 and 165 verses (the number of verses varies in each
published edition; almost no Digambar texts have been subject to adequate collection
of manuscripts and subsequent critical editing, and so most of them in their
printed editions exhibit a similar variability in length and therefore content), while
Ashadhara’s text is 143 verses, and Banarsidas’s is 103 verses.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 83

consisted of both prose and 278 Sanskrit verses. In time, the verse portion
of the commentary was separated from the prose, and became treated as an
independent text with the name Samayasāra kalaśa. Amritachandra’s text was
to a significant extent responsible for the widespread Digambar adoption
of Kundakunda’s two-truth mystical philosophy, according to which from
the absolute perspective (niścaya-naya) the self (atman) is the only existent
that is “really real”, whereas everything else is only provisionally real from
the relative perspective (vyavahāra-naya).73 Amritachandra’s text further
influenced subsequent Sanskrit commentaries on Kundakunda’s text
and also generated vernacular commentaries, starting with a fourteenth-
century Kannada prose commentary (vachanika) by the monk Balachandra.
In this vernacular tradition was also the prose Bālbodh of Pande Rajmall,
composed in the sixteenth century. As we saw above, this in turn was the
inspiration and guide for Banarsidas’s Samaysār nāṭak. According to Bhatt,
Banarsidas’s text followed Rajmall’s fairly closely, with the main difference
being that the former “is more elaborate and poetic”, and the latter
“philosophic and precise”.74 This is not surprising, given that Banarsidas
by training and personality was a poet, while Rajmall by training and
personality was a philosopher. Bhatt has also carefully delineated the
relationship between Banarsidas’s Samaysār nāṭak and Amritachandra’s
Samayasāra kalaśa:

The Samayasāra-nāṭaka contains 732 rhymes in Hindi for 278 kalasha-verses,

that is, more than two rhymes have been allotted to each kalasha-verse, on
the average. But the rhymes are not so evenly distributed. Strictly speaking,
the rhymes are not a translation, nor do they have any explanatory character.
They just touch on the kalasha-verses and run independently as a lucid poetry.

Param jyotī stotra/Kalyāṇamandira stotra

If Banarsidas’s Nāmamālā, Jinasahasranām and Samaysār nāṭak were
vernacular texts that bore varying degrees of indexical translation
relationship to their Sanskrit forebears, the other two texts were clearly
translations in the most iconic sense.

73 The best introduction to Kundakunda’s two-truth doctrine remains Bansidhar Bhatt,

‘Vyavahāra-naya and Niścaya-naya in Kundakunda’s Works’, in XVIII. Deutscher
Orientalistentag vom 1. bis 5. Oktober 1972 in Lübeck, Vorträge. Zeitschrift der deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Supplement II, ed. by Wolfgang Voigt (Wiesbaden: Franz
Steiner Verlag, 1974), pp. 279-91.
74 B. Bhatt (1994), p. 439.

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84 Tellings and Texts

Banarsidas’s 1633 translation of the Kalyāṇamandira stotra is also

known as the Param joti (or Param jyotī) stotra, after the first two words
of the first verse.75 This has long been a common way of “titling” hymns;
for example, the Sanskrit original starts kalyāṇamandira, “auspicious
temple”. For reasons of metre, Banarsidas translated this as śivmandir,
also “auspicious temple”. The first verse of Banarsidas’s poem, a simple
doha, is not found in the original, and so serves as an independent
invocatory verse.76 Only with the second verse did Banarsidas begin
directly to translate Kumudachandra’s text. Banarsidas then in forty-
three subsequent verses in a variety of metres reproduced in Braj the
forty-four verses (all in the Vasantatilaka metre) of the original Sanskrit.
The final verse is a slightly longer one, of six feet, allowing Banarsidas
to provide a signature colophon, in which the translated nature of his
composition was made clear:

The wise Kumudachandra made this Kalyāṇamandira.

Banarsi said it in the vernacular, for the sake of pure right faith.77

Sūktimuktāvalī
The joint translation of the Sūktimuktāvalī by Banarsidas and Kaunrpal,
done the following year, in 1634, gives us a further indication of the
ways in which textual practice in seventeenth-century Agra was a shared,
perhaps even semi-public performance. By this time in his life Banarsidas
was obviously a highly skilled and well-practiced poet. Kaunrpal, on
the other hand, was a younger poet. He was the nephew of Dharamdas,
one of Banarsidas’s business partners and a fellow participant in the

75 In this form a partial edition of the hymn was first published by Luigi Tessitori
in Indian Antiquary in 1913, on the basis of an incomplete manuscript; Luigi P.
Tessitori, ‘Paramajotistotra: An Old Braja Metrical Version of Siddhasenadivākara’s
Kalyāṇamandirastotra’, Studi Gianici (Udine: Società Indologica Luigi Pio Tessitori),
pp. 307-15 (originally in Indian Antiquary 43 (1913), 42-46). Because the manuscript
lacked the concluding signature verse, Tessitori did not know the identity of the
translator.
76 Kalyāṇamandira stotra 1, in BV, Bombay edn, 126; BV, Jaipur edn, p. 124:
paramaj[y]otī paramātamā paramajñāna paravīna /
bandauṃ paramānandamaya ghaṭa ghaṭa antaralīna //
The supreme light, the supreme soul, the supreme knowledge, skillful:
I venerate the one made of supreme bliss, the essence of every being.
77 
Kalyāṇamandira stotra 44, in BV, Bombay edn, p. 130; BV, Jaipur edn, p. 128:
yaha kalyāṇamandira kiyau kumudacandra kī buddhi /
bhāṣā kahata banārasī kārana samakita suddhi //

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 85

spiritual seminar. Kaunrpal outlived Banarsidas, becoming the leader

of the Adhyatma circle in Agra after him. It is likely, therefore, that he
was younger by one or two decades. Mukund Lath describes him as “an
occasional writer of verses on spiritual themes”.78 He is known to have
composed only one other text, a short poem on Jain right faith called
the Samakit battīsī. He composed it in 1630, four years before he and
Banarsidas finished their joint translation.79
In the signature colophon to their translation, Banarsidas and
Kaunrpal gave a hint of how they worked together. They wrote:

It’s called the Sūktimuktāvalī, and has twenty-two chapters.

In total extent the text has one-hundred verses.
The pair of friends Kunvarpal and Banarsi are like-minded (ikacitt).
They did the text in the vernacular, in verses of various meters.80

The key word here is ikacitt (pron. ikachitt), literally “of one mind”, and
which I have translated as “like-minded”. It indicates that they saw
eye to eye, or thought in the same way, and hence that this was a joint
project. In Gujarati the word also has a range of spiritual meanings, of
a person who is fixed in meditation (dhyan-stha), or who is absorbed in
a spiritual state (tallin),81 so Kaunrpal and Banarsidas may have used it
here to indicate a deeper spiritual harmony that suffused their task of
collaborative translation.
Within their translation, however, we also see indications of a
different modus operandi, as perhaps the two divided the task. Many
of the individual verses contain a signature. In twenty-three verses
the signature is of Banarsidas, and in only five do we find the name
of Kaunrpal. This may indicate that Banarsidas did the bulk of the
work, and that Kaunrpal contributed only a few verses. That the verses
with Banarsidas’s signature all occur in the first half of the poem, and
those with Kaunrpal’s signature all in the last half, may indicate still
another way in which the labour was divided. But the use of ikachitt

78 Lath (1981).
79 Premi (1957), p. 101.
80 Sūktamuktāvalī, colophon 1-2, in BV, Bombay edn, p. 68; BV, Jaipur edn, p. 71:
nāma sūktimuktāvalī dvāviṃśati adhikāra /
śataśloka paramāna saba iti grantha vistāra //
kuṅvarapāla banārasī mitra jugala ikacitta /
tinahiṃ grantha bhāṣā kiyo bahuvidha [bahuvidhi] chanda kavitta //
81 Shastri (1976), Vol. 1, p. 345.

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86 Tellings and Texts

would appear to argue against a division of labour and in favour of a

collaborative method of translation.82
Collaborative composition was a common practice of the time, and
probably was part of the cultural practice of a circle meeting in a temple.
One of the five companions whom Banarsidas mentions in the Samaysār
nāṭak, and who also features prominently in the Ardhakathānak, was
Dharamdas. He was Kaunrpal’s uncle, and for many years a business
partner of Banarsidas. He and Banarsidas both settled in Agra in their later
years, and evidently also shared in the practice of poetry. There is only
one poem by Dharamdas that is extant, the seven-verse Guruśiṣyakathanī.
In Mukund Lath’s description, it is “in the form of a discourse by a guru
to his disciple, teaching the hollowness of all worldly things and the
superior merits of the spiritual life”.83 To quote Lath further, in this poem
“the metre and rhyme are interestingly unusual”. It maintains a strong
rhyme scheme throughout the poem, with the final consonant in every
case being a doubled retroflex -ṭṭ-. This results in a poem that is baroque
in its artificiality. It is most likely not a coincidence that there is a poem
by Banarsidas that exhibits a similar form, his Mokṣapaiḍī, “The Steps to
Liberation”. In this poem the rhyme scheme involves the equally baroque
use of a doubled -ll-. Banarsidas’s poem is significantly longer—twenty-
two verses in addition to a two-verse colophon—perhaps indicating
his greater skill at sustaining this difficult form. Lath comments, “the
two friends had evidently decided to try their skill in a new, exciting
metre together”. One can easily imagine the two friends meeting in the
veranda of a temple and spending the afternoon engrossed in the shared
composition of poems that displayed their literary skills.84

82 See also Lath (1981, p. 200), who hypothesises: “The two translators seem to have
divided much of their work between them, and many stanzas, therefore, bear their
individual signatures. But a sizeable number do not carry any name, and may have
been joint efforts”.
83 Ibid., p. 179.
84 A verse from each poem will indicate what the two poets were doing.
Dharamdas, Guruśiṣyakathanī, verse 1 (Premi 1957, p. 103):
iṇa saṃsāra samudrakau tākai paiṃ taṭṭā /
suguru kahai suṇi prāṇiyā tūṃ dharaje dhrama baṭṭā //
Banarsidas, Mokṣapaiḍī, verse 1 (BV, p. 132):
ikka samay rucivantano guru akkhai sunamalla /
jo tujha andaracetanā vahai tusāṛī alla //
The artificiality of these poems is seen in that the editors of the Jaipur edition of the
Banārsī vilās had to provide an extensive gloss to explain the Mokṣapaiḍī. R.K. Jain
(1966, p. 169) adds that in the Mokṣapaiḍī, a composition unique within Banarsidas’s
oeuvre, the poet employed many Panjabi verbs and inflections.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 87

The Continued Performance of

Translation after Banarsidas
The performance of iconic translation that seems to have begun—or
at the very least raised to a new level of visibility—with Banarsidas in
the middle of the seventeenth century in Agra did not end with him.
One of the leaders of the Adhyatma seminars in Agra after the death
of Banarsidas was Hemraj Pande.85 He was the author of both indexical
and iconic translations.
The first extant reference to Hemraj Pande is from 1644, when he
was described as participating in a seminar (gyan mandali) along
with Bhagavatidas (also Bhagotidas), one of the men Banarsidas had
mentioned earlier in the context of the Adhyatma seminar.86 Hemraj
was a disciple of Rupchand Pande. Premi argues that this was the same
Rupchand who delivered the sermons on the Gommaṭasāra in 1635,87 and
so Hemraj was in the tradition of professionally trained intellectuals
working under the leadership of the bhattaraks.
In 1652 Hemraj composed two texts at the request of Kaunrpal,
presumably for use in the seminars.88 One of these was a summary
of eighty-four points of disagreement between the Digambars
and Shvetambars, entitled Caurāsī bol. The other was a vernacular
commentary (Bālbodh) on the Pravacanasāra, another central text on
Digambar spirituality by Kundakunda. In his colophon Hemraj wrote:
“Please listen to how I prepared this simple rendering of this great
work. There is in Agra a prominent authority and learned man named
Kanvarpal. At his request I rendered this extremely difficult text into the
vernacular”.89

85 For information on Hemraj, see Padmanabh Jaini, ‘Caurāsī Bol of Hemrāj Pāṇḍe’,
in Jambū-jyoti (Munivara Jambūvijaya Festschrift), ed. by M.A. Dhaky and J.B. Shah
(Ahmedabad: Shreshthi Kasturbhai Lalbhai Smarak Nidhi, 2004, pp. 374-98) and
(2007), pp. 31-35; Kaslival (1986), pp. 204-54, and Premi (1957), pp. 107-08.
86 Premi (1957), p. 36.
87 Ibid., p. 89.
88 Hemraj gave the year as VS 1709. Jaini (2004) calculated this as 1653, assuming that
the difference between VS and CE is 56 years. While this is true for Gujarat, a more
accurate calculation for North India requires a difference of 57 years.
89 Translation slightly altered from Jaini (2007, p. 31); original at Pravacanasāra, p. 346:
bālabodha yah kīnī jaise so tuma sunahu kahūṃ maiṃ taisai /
nagara āgare maiṃ hitakārī kaṅvarapāla gyātā avikārī //
tina vicāra jiya maiṃ iha kīnī jo bhāṣā iha hoi navīnī /

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88 Tellings and Texts

Hemraj’s vernacular version of the Pravacanasāra was in the long-

standing tradition of vernacular commentaries. He explicitly modelled
his version on the earlier vernacular commentary on the Samayasāra by
Rajmall.90 Hemraj composed vernacular commentaries on at least five
other important Digambar doctrinal texts, and a number of original
works in Brajbhasha.91
Hemraj also composed an iconic translation of the c. sixth-century
Sanskrit Bhaktāmara stotra of Manatunga, the most beloved of all
Jain hymns. While there have been other Digambar translations of
Manatunga’s text into Hindi, Hemraj’s remains the most popular; there
are many manuscript copies of it in the Digambar libraries of North India,
and it is included in almost all of the locally produced hymnals found in
every Digambar temple in North India. Hemraj followed Manatunga’s
text faithfully, reproducing in forty-eight Brajbhasha verses the forty-
eight Sanskrit verses of the Digambar version of the hymn. In a manner
similar to Banarsidas’s translation of the Kalyāṇamandira stotra, he began
with a simple auspicious verse not found in the original, and then
proceeded with the translation proper. Manatunga’s text concluded
with a signature verse. Hemraj retained it, and then added his own
signature, indicating clearly that he was translating Manatunga’s text:

Devotion will arise in the mind of any man who memorises this hymn.
Manatunga is absorbed in his soul, and has attained the wealth of liberation.
Hemraj rendered the Bhaktāmar in the vernacular for the sake of well-being.
Whoever recites it with the right spirit will attain the land of liberation.92

The Digambar practice of iconic translation has continued unabated ever

since the work of Banarsidas and Hemraj. Many of the leading Digambar

90 
Pravacanasāra, p. 346:
yaha vicāra mana maiṃ tina rākhī pāṇḍe hemarāja sauṃ bhākhī /
āgaiṃ rājamalla naiṃ kīnī samayasāra bhāṣā rasalīnī //
91 See Kaslival (1986), pp. 207-24.
92 Hemraj, Bhaktāmara Stotra Bhāṣā, verse 48:
je nara paharaiṃ kaṇṭha bhāvanā mana meṃ bhāvaiṃ /
mānatuṅga te nijādhīna śivalakṣmī pāvaiṃ //
bhāṣā bhaktāmara kaiyau hemarāja hita heta /
je nara padhaiṃ subhāvasauṃ te pāvaiṃ śivakheta //
See John Cort, ‘Devotional Culture in Jainism: Mānatuṅga and His Bhaktāmara Stotra’,
in Incompatible Visions: South Asian Religions in History and Culture: Essays in Honor of
David M. Knipe, ed. by James Blumenthal (Madison: Center for South Asia, University
of Wisconsin, 2005), pp. 93-115.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 89

Hindi poets of North India composed translations. For example, in

Agra, Dyanatray (1676-1726) translated the Sanskrit Svayambhū stotra
of Samantabhadra (c. fifth century) and the Sanskrit Ekibhāva stotra of
Vadiraja (c. tenth century), and Bhudhardas (fl.1724-1749) also translated
Vadiraja’s hymn. Poets in other Digambar religious and cultural centres
engaged in the constant practice of translation as well. Starting in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we see the introduction of
British colonial conceptions of translation, but for several hundred years
before this it was an indigenous tradition.93

Iconic Translation in Agra: Something New?

To what extent was the Digambar Jain practice of iconic translation in
Agra in the mid-seventeenth century something new? In the absence
of explicit theorisation about translation on the part of the translators
themselves, or other contemporary literary theorists, this is a difficult
question to address.
As I have indicated above, the practice of translation was not new
in South Asia. The Jains in particular were accustomed to working in
and between multiple languages. Their sacred scriptures and other early
authoritative texts were in various dialects of Prakrit, while from early in
the Common Era the Jains had been full participants in the intellectual
and literary cultures of Sanskrit (and later Apabhramsha). The many

93 For example, in 1905, Nathuram Premi, the well-known Jain scholar, and also one of
the leading publishers of modern Hindi literature in the first half of the twentieth-
century, said the following in defense of his decision to publish what he called
a “new verse translation” (navīn padyānuvād) of Manatunga’s Bhaktāmara stotra, the
Brajbhasha translation of which by Hemraj was so widely known and loved: “No
doubt Hemraj’s translation (anuvād) is very beautiful, full of virtues, and excellent.
But it is an independent translation (svatantra anuvād), in which only the sentiment
(bhāv) is grasped. The respected translator has not given the full sense of every verse
and word… There is one more thing I want to say about Hemraj’s translation, which
is this, that for the translation of this stotra the chaupāī metre is inadequate. Due to
the restrictions of metre, in many places the translation is difficult to understand
and strays from the intention. I don’t want to criticise the respected Hemraj, but just
show that while his translation is good, it is not without faults”. Nathuram Premi,
bhūmikā to his translation of Manatunga, Bhaktāmara stotra (reprint, Mumbai: Hindi
Granth Karyalay, 2012), pp. 3-4 ; for Premi, see Manish Modi, ‘Pandit Nathuram
Premi: Jain Scholar and Publisher’, Jaina Studies: Newsletter of the Centre of Jaina
Studies 2 (2007), 42-44.

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90 Tellings and Texts

Sanskrit commentaries of Prakrit texts often included a literal word-

for-word trot or chāyā, in which the Prakrit was as directly as possible
rendered into Sanskrit. This was also a common practice for the Prakrit
passages in Sanskrit dramas.
Then there was the practice of vernacular commentarial translations
(the difference between the two genres usually being one of degree,
not kind), often known as bālbodh or bālāvabodh, which Phyllis Granoff
has translated as “Instructions for the Unlettered”. While this was an
especially popular genre among Jains, it was also widely found among
Hindu authors. Jnaneshvar’s thirteenth-century Marathi version of the
Bhagavadgītā is one of the best-known examples in this genre, although
we have no direct evidence that Banarsidas and the other Jain Brajbhasha
poets in seventeenth-century North India knew it. Banarsidas’s Samaysār
nāṭak fits firmly within this practice of translation-as-commentary.
There was also a long and well-known tradition of indexical and
symbolic translations in South Asia, especially of narrative texts. The
Jains for centuries had been among the most prolific at composing such
texts, with their many versions of Jain Puranas and other narrative
texts existing in all the languages in which they wrote. Mughal
North India saw other examples of the vernacularisation of classical
texts, such as Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas. In his introduction, Tulsidas
explicitly said that he was retelling the story of Rāma in the vernacular.94
Poets in most of the languages of North India composed vernacular
versions of the Hindu classics such as the Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata,
and Bhāgavata-purāṇa.95 Some of these were indexical and symbolic

94 Rāmcaritmānas 1.7. Jains have posited a connection between Tulsidas and Banarsidas
that may represent an attempt to bring the latter more firmly within the circle of
the stars of Hindi devotional poetry. Both Mulchand Jain and Ravindra Kumar Jain
(1966, pp. 112-13) relate an oral tradition (kimvadanti, jan-shruti) that connects the two.
Tulsidas heard about Banarsidas, and so travelled to Agra to meet him. Tulsidas gave
Banarsidas a copy of his newly composed Rāmcaritmānas, and Banarsidas in return
composed a poem on the spot. Later the two exchanged poems: Banarsidas gave
Tulsidas a Hindi stotra to Parshvanath, which Tulsidas adapted as his Bhakti viradāvalī,
and returned to Banarsidas, Mulchand Jain, Jain kaviyoṃ kā itihās yā prācīn hindī jain
kavi (Damoh: Subhchintak Press, 1937), pp. 34-36; while Ravindra Kumar Jain does
not cite Mulchand Jain, he clearly derived his telling from the earlier text.
95 While Tulsidas was fluent in Sanskrit, it is possible that not all the other translators
were. Grahame Niemann has argued that many of the authors of vernacular
Bhāgavata-purāṇas did not know Sanskrit ‘Bhūpati’s Bhāgavat and the Hindi Bhāgavat
Genre’, in Bhakti in Current Research, 1979-82, ed. by Monika Thiel-Horstmann (Berlin:
Dietrich Reiner Verlag, 1983), pp. 257-69. Their translations, therefore, were either
simply vernacular retellings, or else “translations” from the same language, much in

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 91

translations, and hence most scholars in English have characterised

them as “versions”, “retellings”, “reworkings”, or “adaptations”, not as
“translations”.96 Some of these, however, such as Nanddas’s Brajbhasha
Bhāṣā dasamskandh, an unfinished translation of the tenth book of the
Bhāgavata-purāṇa, more closely approximated iconic translations.97 How
aware Banarsidas, Kaunrpal, Hemraj, and the other Jain authors were
of these contemporaneous developments in “Hindu” (both Brahminical
and non-Brahminical) circles is difficult to know, although the Jains
have always been avid readers, as is evidenced by the number of non-
Jain texts found in Jain manuscript libraries. As we saw in the case of
Banarsidas, Jains have also been dependent upon Brahmins for “secular”
education in both basic literacy skills and the more advanced skills
needed for literary production. The intellectual and literary boundaries
between these communities were highly porous.
There was also a vibrant culture of literary translation in the Mughal
court itself, as well as in other Islamicate courts. Classics of Indic
narrative and science were translated into Islamicate languages, and
in other ways Persianised and Islamicised, as in the example of the
Mirigāvatī, Madhumālatī, and other Indic folk texts that were recast in
sufi and courtly settings. There were also translations of Islamicate texts
from Persian into Sanskrit and Indic vernacular languages.

the spirit of Robert Bly’s popular “translations” of Kabir and Mirabai, in which he
worked from existing English translations. This raises, of course, the difficult question
of what it means to “know” a language, and the relationship of such knowledge to
the distinction between iconic and indexical translations. This issue lies behind the
argument of some contemporary theorists that only a “native speaker” can translate
from a language, as anyone else lacks the depth of linguistic knowledge to render a
faithful translation.
96 For examples, see the articles and books by Bangha and McGregor in the bibliography.
An alternate way of thinking about translation in the South Asian context, especially
in the period when many Sanskrit classics were being rendered into Brajbhasha, is
that of “recycling”; see H. Pauwels, Kṣṇā’s Round Dance Reconsidered: Harirām Vyās’s
Hindi Rās-pañcādhyāyi (Richmond: Curzon, 1996).
97 We have already encountered Nanddas, who lived a generation or two before
Banarsidas, in the context of the Nāmamālās each of them wrote. McGregor (1973, p.
34) estimates that Nanddas died “within a few years of 1585”). In other words, he may
be an important precedent and model for Banarsidas in two genres: the lexicon, and
the iconic translation of poetry. There is no evidence, however, that Banarsidas knew
of Nanddas. But we know precious little of what Banarsidas or any other author of
his time read, and it is conceivable that Banarsidas heard about Nanddas, and even
read some of his works, through his early teacher in Jaunpur, the Brahmin Pandit
Devdatt.

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92 Tellings and Texts

Here again we run into silences in the literary and historical record
that limit our ability to speak of how aware Banarsidas and his fellow
poets were of these literary developments in Islamicate circles. As
Rupert Snell has recently observed, “An often-felt frustration for those
concerned to read Hindi literature against its own historical backdrop
has been precisely the lack of connectivity between the literary texts
on the one hand and historical data on the other”.98 While the work of
scholars such as Allison Busch and Audrey Truschke certainly allows
us to say much more about literary and social interactions within
and without Mughal court circles, we are still somewhat in the dark
concerning where the Jains fit into those interactions.99 This problem
of silence is exacerbated in the case of Jain Brajbhasha poets, who are
invisible in the writings of their Hindu and Muslim contemporaries.100
Banarsidas himself makes no mention of any literary activities in
Agra except those of the Jain seminars. The Jains (both Digambar and
Shvetambar) played crucial economic and administrative roles in the
Mughal court, so we have to accept that his silence may indicate a lack of
interaction on literary matters. He was explicit about such interactions
in the provincial court of Jaunpur where, as we have seen, he taught
and practiced poetry with the governor, Chini Kilich. Social and literary
interaction might have been easier in the provinces than in the imperial
centre. It was presumably also in Jaunpur that he learned the Mirigāvatī
and Madhumālatī, which he publicly sang during his first residence

98 R. Snell, ‘Introduction: The Study of Pre-Modern Hindi Literature’, South Asia
Research 25 (2005), 9. Addressing this lack of connectivity is, of course, a major goal of
the current volume. See also After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century
North India, ed. by F. Orsini and S. Sheikh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
99 Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Poetry of Mughal India (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011); Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at
the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). See also the
articles by Busch in the bibliography, and Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Pursuit of Persian:
Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies 32, 2 (1998), 317-49. There is a
body of scholarship on the Sanskrit epic poems (mahakavyas) written by a number of
Shvetambar authors that describe the interactions of Shvetambar with the Mughal
court, as well as the Mughal observations of these monks; P. Dundas, History, Scripture
and Controversy in a Medieval Jain Sect (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 53-72.
100 
This erasure continues to the present. Standard histories of Hindi make scant
mention of Jain authors, with the exception of Banarsidas, and then the attention is
solely on his Ardhakathānak. Students in graduate programs in Hindi in India read
Jain Apabhramsha literature as a linguistically necessary precursor to Hindi, and the
Ardhakathānak as the first autobiography in Hindi, but otherwise are taught nothing
about the centuries of vibrant Jain writing in all the various forms of Hindi.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 93

in Agra as a young man. His very knowledge of these Hindavi sufi

classics bespeaks a literary culture that was not hindered by religious
boundaries. In his Banārsī vilās we also find an eleven-verse Śāntināth
Jin stuti, with the notation that it “is in the style of the Candavā of Vaki
[Baqi?] Mahammad Khan”.101 While this author and text are unknown
to me, this is evidence of further knowledge on the part of Banarsidas of
Islamicate literature. Banarsidas’s curiosity about matters literary and
spiritual (and, in his youth, erotic) meant that he was clearly widely
read.102 But we cannot judge whether or not his possibly innovative
approach to translation was in any way influenced or shaped by
translation practices in the Islamicate courtly circles of Agra.
It is possible that Ramanujan’s tripartite classification of translation
is less helpful than it seems at first. What makes sense in twentieth-
century Chicago from a Piercean semiotic stance may be less applicable
in the literary circles of seventeenth-century Agra, as the concerns
about different modes of translation were different in the two settings.103
Nonetheless, Ramanujan’s typology does allow us to see much more
clearly that questions of accuracy and faithfulness that are central
in the long-standing Western practice of iconic translations tend to
disappear in communities that put more emphasis on the practice of
indexical translation. Ramanujan allows us to see that South Asian
concerns about “translation” have for many centuries simply been
different from those in the literary cultures that collectively make up
the “Western” tradition. Theorists of translation from the times of the
Greek translations into Latin, and of Biblical translations into Greek,
Latin, and European vernaculars, have been concerned primarily with
issues of “faithfulness”. Winand Callewaert and Shilanand Hemraj, in
their wide-ranging study of translations of the Bhagavadgītā, wrote, “It

101 BV, pp. 189-91: vākī [bāqī?] mahammad khāna ke candavā kī ḍhāla.
102 To give just one more example, the Banārsī vilās also includes a 7-verse Gorakhnāth ke
vacan, indicating another direction in which Banarsidas’s spiritual questing took him.
103 As alternatives, one might apply a widespread tripartite distinction used by modern
authors in all the North Indian languages, among translations as shabdarth (literal,
word-for-word translation), bhavarth (translating the underlying, deeper message and
intention), and chhaya (free adaptation or “transcreation”); Cort (1994), Callewaert and
Hemraj (1983), pp. 75-77. Another set of distinctions was employed by Saroj Agraval
in her book on the Prabodhacandrodaya tradition in Hindi, in which she distinguished
among anuvad (translation), rupantar (adaptation), svatantra (texts influenced by or
in the style of the original), and anshatah (texts partially influenced by the original);
Prabodhacandroday aur uskī hindī paramparā (Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan,
1962).

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94 Tellings and Texts

would appear that in the Indian tradition translators have been more
concerned with the communication of the message rather than with the
scrupulous preservation of the form”.104 While scholars almost always
want to ask why certain issues do not appear to be matters of significant
concern in a given culture, nonetheless it may very well be the case
that anxiety over the faithfulness of premodern translations was rare in
South Asia.
The issue of genre is also significant here. The three iconic
translations by Banarsidas, Kaunrpal, and Hemraj which I have
discussed are of Sanskrit poems. In translating a narrative text it is
easy, and even expected, for the translator to expand, contract, and in
other ways modify the source as he brings it across into a new linguistic
home. The translation is less of a set “text” as found on paper or in oral
memory than of the entirety of the narration itself. The same is true
of a philosophical or theological work such as Banarsidas’s Samaysār
nāṭak, in which his goal was to bring across into Brajbhasha the concepts
of the original, not necessarily the words and style. Here we see again
how “translation” in many ways is simply a mode of “interpretation” in
another language, and hence blends into the genre of “commentary”.
We must also be mindful of the ways that techniques of mechanical
reproduction, coupled with the growth of concepts of property rights as
extended to literary activity, have profoundly shaped both the practice
and theory of translation in the West in recent centuries. What a literary
critic or a lawyer might today decry as plagiarised and even actionable
was in many other historical and cultural settings simply a matter of
standard practice.
I argue that a poem, however, involves a higher degree of unity
between form and content than does a narrative or philosophical text.105
Theorists throughout the world have often advanced poetry as a primary
example of untranslatability, as a poem in many ways has no content
or meaning outside of the very linguistic form itself. In translating a
poem, therefore, whether a religious stotra or a more “secular” poem in
a niti genre, we should expect a stronger degree of “faithfulness” to be
displayed by the translator. The exact number of verses of a longer poem

104 Callewaert and Hemraj (1983), p. 75.

105 I leave aside here the related question of how one defines “poetry” in medieval
India. While both the classical and vernacular languages distinguished between
non-metrical (gadya) and metrical (padya) language, this does not neatly overlap with
the modern distinction between prose and poetry. Much premodern South Asian
literature in metre bears a closer resemblance to prose than to poetry.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 95

in Sanskrit is often well-known; to alter the length too significantly

would be seen as an act of infidelity.106

Translation and Society

Let me conclude with some comparative observations on the practice
and the framework of translation in seventeenth-century Agra and
after. The same time that Banarsidas and his colleagues were (perhaps)
initiating a new practice of translation in North India also saw the golden
epoch of translation in England, as well as the widespread practice of
and theorisation about translation elsewhere in Europe. Comparing
the contemporaneous situations in North India and England is quite
revealing. By looking at this alternative setting we can see the extent to
which the local situation in seventeenth-century Agra could have been
different. Comparing the two cases shows us ways that translation in
India did not have the same implications that it did in England, and
thereby gives us further insight into cultural and social practices and
structures in seventeenth-century North India. In particular, I briefly
discuss two facets of the practice and social location of translation that
were dominant in England and largely missing in India.
The first concerns philosophical and theological reflection upon
the very practice of translation. As I indicated in the beginning of this
essay, translation had been the subject of extensive theoretical reflection
since the time of the Roman translation of Greek classics into Latin,
and then the Christian translation of scripture into first Greek and
then Latin.107 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English authors gave
much thought to central issues of translation, such as the relationship
between language and meaning, and the tension between faithfulness
and creativity in translation. They asked the basic question of whether
translation is even possible, or if meaning is so deeply imbedded in any
linguistic form that essential elements of meaning are inevitably lost
when a text is transported into another linguistic frame.

106 In the case of the Jinasahasranāma the key element is not the number of verses in the
stotra but the number of names. As a genre, the sahasranama exhibits less unity of form
and content than does a stotra.
107 Within the voluminous scholarship in European languages that has developed over
the past several decades on the subject of translation, see in particular in English
Steiner (1992), Venuti (1995), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. by
Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and, most recently, David Bellos,
Is that a Fish in Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber &
Faber, 2011).

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96 Tellings and Texts

One way in which this second-level reflection upon the practice of

translation can be seen is through the many metaphors advanced by
authors for the translator and his work.108 The well-known and oft-
cited Italian play on words, traduttore-traditore, which implies that the
translator is merely a traitor to meaning, indicates the depth of anxiety
in European thinking on translation. The translator is someone who
follows in the footsteps of others. He engages in a contest that he
inevitably loses. He is a mere labourer, or even a slave, in the service of
a master. He offers glass and imitation jewels in place of diamonds. He
shows only the back of a tapestry, not its front. The reader of a translation
dons a poor garment, not a rich one. The translation is a pale star that
only dimly reflects the sun. It is only a shadow, not a body.
The richness of the metaphorical language in Europe is evidence of
widespread thinking about the nature of translation. This stands in stark
contrast to the very lack of a word to describe the act in seventeenth-
century India. Banarsidas, Kaunrpal, Hemraj, and their successors
simply said that they were “making it vernacular”, using the noun bhasha
(bhāṣā) and a form of the verb √kar. Nor do the Jain poets exhibit any
anxiety concerning the relative merits of their vernacular translations
vis-à-vis the Sanskrit or Prakrit originals. Translators in Europe and
North America ritually express the inadequacies of their translations in
their prefaces; the Jain poets express no such angst.
This is not to say that vernacular poets did not make value judgments
concerning the importance of classical and vernacular languages. The
very language of the balbodh or balavabodh, in which the vernacular text
is expressly aimed at an intellectually less-advanced audience, indicates
that the truly educated reader or hearer would be able to access the
classical original, and would not need the prop of a vernacular version.
Banarsidas, as we have seen, said in his Samaysār nāṭak that educated
people (pandits) could read the Prakrit original and Sanskrit commentary,
but that common people with little understanding (alpmati) required
the vernacular versions of Rajmall and Banarsidas himself. A similar
value judgment is found in the Bhāṣā dasamskandh of Nanddas, who, in
the opening verses of his translation, wrote, “This is the Daśam skandh,
in which I have given some descriptions in the vernacular. The words

108 Theo Hermans, ‘Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation’,
in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Translation, ed. by Theo Hermans (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 103-35.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 97

are like the Sanskrit, but that is difficult to understand. I have therefore
made it easy by making it vernacular”.109
Deven Patel has discussed an articulation of the value of Sanskrit
over the vernacular by the fifteenth-century Bhalan in his Nalākhyān, a
Gujarati translation of the Nala episode of the Mahābhārata. Bhalan’s
comments bear striking similarity to the metaphors used by European
translators that I mentioned above. He wrote that he was presenting
“glass set in cheap metal” in place of “real diamonds, embedded in
gold ornaments”, that his poem was the “coarse millet” eaten by a
poor man instead of the delicacies enjoyed by a rich king, and that his
poem was a “leaf hut” of the down-trodden in lieu of a seven-storey
high-rise building inhabited by the successful.110 Here again, I think
that the anxiety expressed by Bhalan is not the same as expressed by
his contemporaneous European translators. Bhalan was bemoaning
having to compose in the lowly vernacular instead of the truly polished
and sophisticated Sanskrit in which Vyasa had been able to compose
the Mahābhārata. Bhalan was making a twofold hierarchical judgment:
Sanskrit authors are superior to vernacular authors, and an audience
that understands Sanskrit is superior to one that only understands the
vernacular. He was not, however, raising a philosophical or theological
question concerning the very possibility of translation. Bhalan wrote in
the vernacular with the full confidence that by doing so “even a child
could understand”.111
While there does not appear to have been any reflective discourse on the
practice and possibility of translation on the part of the Jain authors, the

109 Nanddas, Bhāṣā dasamskandh, p. 216:

tina kahī daśama skandha ju āhi / bhāṣā kari kachu barano tāhi //
sabada saṃskta ke haiṃ jaisaiṃ / bho pai samujhi parata nahiṃ taisaiṃ //
tātaiṃ sarala su bhāṣā kījai /
In other contexts these lines would be read rather as customary self-effacement.
110 Bhālan, Nalākhyān 1.3-5:
sācā hīrā heme jaḍiyā vaibhava no śaṅgāra /
durbalane to kāc kathīre bhūkhaṇa hoe apāra //
dhanavanta bhū-patine bhojana sarava sañjoge thāe /
niradhana tivārāṃ ati ānande juvāra bājarī khāe //
siddhivantane sapta-bhomanāṃ mandira ūcā avāsa /
parṇa-kuṭi rehe sukha pāme ata durbala pāmī vāsa //
I thank Deven Patel for generously sharing these verses with me in an e-mail dated
30 March 2010. See also Deven Patel, ‘Source, Exegesis, and Translation: Sanskrit
Commentary and Regional Language Translation in South Asia’, in Journal of the
American Oriental Society 131 (2011), 245-66.
111 Bhalan, Nalākhyān 1.2b: kālāṃne prīchavā bhālaṇe bhākhāe e kīdhī.

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98 Tellings and Texts

sort of anxiety that has long underlaid European thought on the subject
was not absent.112 As George Steiner has noted, one source of anxiety about
translation is theological: “So far as speech is divine and numinous, so
far as it encloses revelation, active transmission either into the vulgate
or across the barrier of languages is dubious or frankly evil”.113 This is a
religious theory of untranslatability. We find such a theory in India as well.
The best-known case is perhaps the Brahminical Vedic literature, which is
untranslatable due to the way that the “meaning” of the text inheres to the
very sounds themselves at a level beneath the surface sense.
We find a similar mantric rejection of the possibility of translation
among the Jains. Due to the Jain theory of mantras, the vernacular
translations of hymns such as the Bhaktāmara stotra and Kalyāṇamandira
stotra never supplanted the Sanskrit originals in Jain ritual culture.114
Jains understand that a Sanskrit (or Prakrit) stotra is not simply a
communication event. It is also a performance event. A stotra is
understood to be mantra-maya, i.e. “made of mantras”. While the
expectation is that the person who recites or sings it is full of faith, and
that the intention embodied in that faith is important for the efficacy
of the performance of the stotra, there is a significant extent to which
by its very mantric nature the stotra is efficacious all on its own. This
efficacy does not translate into the vernacular. The vernacular versions
of Banarsidas and Hemraj are widely acknowledged to be beautiful, and
they are found in most contemporary Digambar hymnals. But they are
not mantra-maya, and so the number of people who sing or recite them
daily pales in comparison with the numbers who perform the Sanskrit
originals.
A second key aspect of translation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century England also appears to have been missing in India. As Michaela
Wolf has succinctly put it, “Any translation, as both an enactment and a
product, is necessarily embedded within social contexts”.115 As a result,
translation needs to be placed within these contexts; there needs to be

112 In part this discussion echoes and builds on Cort (1994).
113 Steiner (1992), p. 251.
114 See also Cort (2005) and ‘A Spell against Snakes and other Calamities: The
Uvasaggahara Stotra Attributed to Bhadrabāhu Svāmī’, Jinamañjari 34.2 (2006), 34-43.
Unlike Brahmins, Jains considered Prakrit as also capable of bearing the same mantric
power as Sanskrit; Dundas (1998).
115 M. Wolf, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of a Sociology of Translation’, in Constructing
a Sociology of Translation, ed. by M. Wolf and A. Fukari (Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company), p. 1.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 99

what Wolf and others term “a sociology of translation”. Translators live

in specific social locations, and so the very act of translation has social
implications.
This is clearly seen when we look at the English contemporaries of
Banarsidas, Kaunrpal, and Hemraj. Translation in England was part of two
larger social processes. One was the discovery and appropriation of the
classical past. In the words of F.O. Matthiessen, “A study of Elizabethan
translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to
England”.116 Translation was also part of the broader Protestantising
of European Christianity. The process of vernacularising the Bible
began before the Reformation, but in the early sixteenth century any
attempt to translate the Christian scripture was inevitably done within
a charged religious context—and in an era when religion and state were
thoroughly intertwined, it was therefore done within a political context
as well. This was a lesson William Tyndale learned all too well when he
was tortured and executed for heresy in 1536 for daring to translate the
Bible into English.
In seventeenth-century England translation as a cultural practice was
still deeply implicated in contemporary social and political processes,
for it was inseparable from the production of literature more broadly.
This was not a period in which freedom of expression was taken for
granted. Rather:

the ideological policy of the English monarchial, ecclesiastical, and

patriarchal state during and after the reformation was to maintain
political and institutional control over individual and group reading.
Reading, here, encompasses interpretations and translations of the texts
of Scripture, the law, and classical antiquity […] all directed reading and
translation was to redound to the good of the commonwealth.117

Especially in the contentious decades of the Civil War and the Restoration,
all publications were seen by whichever party was in power as having
social and political implications. This was a time of printed pamphlets,
so the lag between composition and publication was very short. Printed
literature had a social and political immediacy that nowadays we
associate with media such as newspapers, radio, television, and now

116 F.O. Matthiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), quoted by W. Boutcher, ‘The
Renaissance’, in France (2000), p. 45.
117 Boutcher (2000), p. 52.

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100 Tellings and Texts

the blogosphere. All publication, therefore, was done within the social
context of government censorship.118
In such a setting, many authors turned to translation of the Greek
and Roman classics as a way of saying things for which they would
be jailed if it were an “original” work.119 The loyalist John Dryden, for
example, found it safer to express many of his pro-monarchy opinions
in the words of classical authors than as his own thoughts.
Here again by turning to seventeenth-century England we see
features of translation as a social practice that were missing in Agra. The
Jain poets were clearly aware of the political conditions within which
they lived and worked. Banarsidas’s Ardhakathānak is full of discussions
of the doings of the Mughal rulers and their agents. The colophon to his
Nāmamālā includes praise of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir: “Every day
his glory and majesty is victorious, and there is always bountiful food.
The emperor is the source of steady radiance, that Emperor Jahangir”.120
Many colophons of manuscripts include explicit reference to which
Mughal emperor was on the throne.121
The Jain poets’ translations, however, were not politics by other means.
They did not turn to translations of classical and medieval Prakrit and
Sanskrit works to say things they otherwise could not say in Hindi. A
very significant difference was one of technology: Banarsidas, Kaunrpal,
and Hemraj operated in an economy of the hand-written manuscript,
whereas their English contemporaries operated in an economy of the
printed, mass-produced pamphlet. Banarsidas made no mention of how
he obtained the paper on which he wrote his texts, but we know for
certain that writing for him involved ink and paper, and that texts were
physical objects on paper. We saw above that Arathmal Dhor gave him a

118 Annabel Pattareson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading
in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
119 Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture,
1646-1726 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jack Lynch, ‘Political Ideology in
Translations of the Iliad, 1660-1715’, Translation and Literature 7.1 (1998), 23-41.
120 Banarsidas, Nāmamālā, verse 172:
dina dina tej pratāpa jaya / sadā akhaṇḍita āna //
pātasāha thira nūradī / jahāṅgīra sulatāna //
121 To take just two examples: a manuscript of the Banarsidas-Kaunrpal translation of the
Sūktimuktāvalī was copied in 1639 (just five years after they wrote it) in Agra during
the reign of “Pātisāh Sāhijahāṃ” (K. Kaslival and A. Nyaytirth, Rājasthān ke jain śāstra
bhaṇḍāroṃ kī granth-sūcī, Vol. 5, Mahavirji: Shri Digambar Jain Atishay Kshetra Shri
Mahavirji, 1972, #6657); and a manuscript of Banarsidas’s Samaysār nāṭak was copied
in 1651 in Lahore during the reign of “Bādśāh Śāhjahāṃ” (ibid., #5692.4).

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 101

manuscript (likhi, pothi) of the Samayasāra in 1633. Many years earlier, in

1605, Banarsidas had repented of the infatuation with love represented
in his long poem about the nine rasas. In a fit of regret at what he
perceived as misspent teenage years, he threw the manuscript (pothi)
into the Gomti River in Jaunpur, where the pages (patra) floated away.122
Banarsidas’s seeming ready access to paper may have been a sign of
his middle-class merchant economic status, and paper may not have
been as readily available in seventeenth-century North India as it was in
seventeenth-century England. C.A. Bayly indicates that it was not until
the later seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries that North
India began to see the widespread production of paper manuscripts.123
Banarsidas’s English contemporaries also lived in a society in which
the ruling authorities expressed greater concern to control their subjects,
as evidenced by the active presence of official censors. While the Jain
translators would have been in trouble had they pronounced anti-Mughal
sentiments in the public sphere, the Mughal (and more broadly late-
medieval Indian) culture of allowing religiously-defined communities
a fair degree of “private space” meant that their translations did not
inherently carry political consequences. The Mughals sought to gain
the knowledge of their subjects that they needed to rule effectively; but
Bayly has estimated, “the detailed descriptions of royal intelligence we
encounter may have represented more of an aspiration than a reality”.124
The Mughals did not exert detailed control over the religious lives of
their subjects, especially outside of the most visible public sphere, as
“the close bureaucratic control of heresy and witchcraft which forged
the early modern European state had no equivalent in India”. Religious
communities such as the Jains were expected to police such matters
internally, and only if matters “passed beyond the bounds of propriety”,
or involved major public shrines, did the officials intervene. Banarsidas
gave no evidence of Mughal intrusion into his religious life; only as
merchants (and therefore sources of ready revenue for a cash-poor
government) were he and his fellow Jains subject to close scrutiny and
interference.125 The Mughal court did not have a high ranking post of

122 AK 264-68; Lath (1981), p. 244; Chowdhury (2009), pp. 110-12.
123 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in
India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 42.
124 Ibid., p. 13.
125 Ibid., pp. 26-27. See also his observation that the Mughal system of surveillance “was
designed to cajole the subject into godly submission, rather than to mount a constant

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102 Tellings and Texts

official censor, and the acts of reading, writing, and translating were not
seen as inevitably tied to the ruler and the legitimacy of his rule.
Translation was not innocent of all social implications, however.
Nathuram Premi has argued that the hundreds of translations of Prakrit
and Sanskrit (and, I should add, Apabhramsa as well) texts into the
vernacular undermined the traditional authority of the bhattaraks. Premi
said that this was an intentional program on the part of Terapanth
scholars, who were opposed to the domesticated bhattaraks of the
Bispanth.126
The past three centuries have indeed seen a dramatic social and
theological transformation in the North Indian Digambar community
due to the rise of the Digambar Terapanth sect.127 While many of the
roots of this transformation go back to the Adhyatma movement
of Agra and other urban centres in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, its more immediate origins are found in the Jaipur area in
the early eighteenth century. The Terapanth is a lay movement that
has argued against the worship of deities other than the Jinas, against
the use of flowers and other living (or formerly living) substances in
rituals, and against the authority of the bhattaraks. As a result of this
movement, many Digambar congregations and temples in North India
(and especially in Bundelkhand) now follow Terapanth ritual practices,
and have rejected the bhattaraks. The movement has been so successful
that even Bispanth congregations and temples, that maintained their
adherence to the older Digambar ritual culture, have adopted aspects of
Terapanth style. In particular, the Terapanth criticism of the bhattaraks as
false Jain monks has resulted in the extinction of the bhattarak tradition
throughout North and central India; it survives only in South India, in
Kannada and Tamil speaking areas. Premi argued that the translation
of classical texts into the vernacular was part of a Terapanth agenda of
shifting literary and intellectual authority away from the bhattaraks and
their trained assistants, the pandes, into the hands of the laity.
I am reluctant to make such a strong claim in the absence of any
explicit evidence that this was the intention of the translators. Many

policing of society as some nineteenth-century European states [and England as well,

I would argue, during the seventeenth-century Civil War and Restoration] attempted
to do” (1996, p. 19).
126 Nathuram Premi, ‘Digambar sampradāy ke saṅgh’, in Jain Śvetāmbar Kānfarens Herald
11.9 (1915), 538.
127 See Cort (2002) on the Terapanth-Bispanth division among North Indian Digambars.

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 103

translations also came from the hands of Bispanth authors. There is no

denying, however, that the traditional authority of the bhattaraks, which
was based on their control over the Sanskrit literary culture of the
Digambars, and was institutionally personified in the pandes who were
their disciples and whom they deputed to various temples to conduct
rituals, give sermons and lead seminars, was lessened as Digambar
textual culture moved out of their control and into the broader Digambar
public sphere. This process was, to a significant extent, connected to the
practice of translation.128

Making it Vernacular:
Translation in South Asia
In this essay, I have employed A.K. Ramanujan’s tripartite categorisation
of translation to bring into focus some of the distinctive aspects of
translation as literary practice among Jains in seventeenth-century Agra.
Translation was nothing new. Just as multi-linguality is a universal
aspect of human culture, so is translation, as people have never allowed
the existence of multiple and even mutually unintelligible languages
to be an impenetrable barrier to linguistic communication. Translation
has a deep history in South Asia, and Jains have always been vital
participants in that history. They have translated among Sanskrit,
Prakrits, Apabhramshas, and other classical and vernacular languages
for two millennia.
The medieval and pre-modern period in North India was also a time
and place where the need and practice of translation was highlighted.
While Islamicate cultures and languages had been present in South
Asia for many centuries, the Mughals and their courtiers brought into

128 
Premi’s argument does, however, highlight one aspect of the social politics of
translation that was missing from the Digambar Jain context. Among Hindus in the
medieval and pre-modern period, translation was often implicated in challenges to
the authority of the Brahmins, both in terms of their monopolistic claims over Sanskrit,
and their related claims that only Sanskrit was suitable for the transmission of true
knowledge. Translation, in other words, was a site of contestation over hierarchical
caste claims. While caste is also integral to the personhood and social identities of
Jains, it operates less in terms of hierarchy and more in terms of difference, and so has
not been a divisive factor in Jain society; see John Cort, ‘Jains, Caste, and Hierarchy
in North Gujarat’, in Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy?, ed. by Dipankar Gupta
(New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), pp. 73-112. Translation among Jains has not
been a marker or tactic of subversion of caste hierarchies.

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104 Tellings and Texts

South Asia a renewed emphasis on Persian, Turkic, and Arabic literary

cultures. The Mughal courtly culture was also deeply intertwined
with indigenous cultures, to the extent that the distinction of foreign
and native, imported and vernacular, was often meaningless on the
ground. Sanskrit and related classical Indic languages had a vital
place in the cosmopolitan urban culture of North India. While Prakrit
was clearly waning, and relegated to restricted social settings, it was
not totally absent. Fifteenth-century Gwalior saw the final flowering
of Apabhramsha.129 While Brajbhasha and other vernaculars did not
always carry the same prestige as the older literary languages in courtly
circles, this period saw their rise to a position of prominence.130 In other
words, urban North India in this period was home to many linguistic
literary traditions. Many authors were fluent in multiple languages,
in continuity with older court traditions that a true poet, to be one of
the jewels of the court, should be able to compose in as many as six
languages at once.
In all of this linguistic richness and diversity, translation was an
inevitable activity. Translation went in multiple directions. Many of these
translations were in the time-honoured South Asian tradition of indexical
and symbolic translations, as earlier narratives, theological treatises,
and philosophical discourses were brought into new languages with
varying degrees of innovation and faithfulness. Some of these bore clear
traces of their indebtedness to the texts and languages being translated,
and others were translations only in the loosest understandings of the
term. There were many vernacular commentaries, aimed at a putatively
childlike or unlettered audience that was fully comfortable only in
the vernacular. While far too few of these translations have received
the attention they are due, as scholars have preferred to study texts
deemed “original” instead of translated, translation in various forms
was ubiquitous. All of these genres of translation also fit easily into
long-established modes of translation in the subcontinent.
But there may have been something new, as well. Banarsidas, Kaunrpal,
and Hemraj all produced iconic translations of Sanskrit poems. In these
translations, the translators explicitly acknowledged the authorship of

129 See Eva De Clercq, ‘Apabhraṃśa as a Literary Medium in Fifteenth Century North
India’, in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, ed. by
F. Orsini and S. Sheikh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 339-64.
130 Busch (2010).

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 Making it Vernacular in Agra 105

the original text by a Sanskrit poet. They faithfully adhered to the length
of the originals in their translations. They did not claim to be composing
original texts, but rather simply to be “making it vernacular”. Whether
or not these translators saw what they were doing as something new and
innovative is open to question; there is no evidence that they did. But
this is part of a larger silence of theorising about translation in the pre-
modern South Asian literary tradition. Just how new this mode of iconic
translation was is also open to question. Arguments from silence are
always hazardous. This is especially the case when the silence concerns
vast archives that have barely been studied, and a subject that has been
marginalised by generations of scholars.
This essay is a highly tentative foray into a topic that has hitherto
received little scholarly attention. Almost all discussions of translation
in India are from a postcolonial framework, and concern the power
disparities between English and vernacular writing. Translation,
however, even faithful iconic translation, is not something that did
not exist in India until the coming of British colonialism. This essay,
therefore, serves as an introduction to one particular, local instance of
translation as a cultural and social practice. It is also an invitation to
other scholars to explore other literatures in pre-colonial India using
the framework of translation. Among the Jains of seventeenth-century
Agra, at least, the performative aspects of North Indian literary culture
involved translation in addition to other genres.

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