I plan to start my sabbatical leave with a period of field work in India (AP1), collating and digitally copying manuscripts of the compositions of Yaśaḥkîrti and Raïdhû, two authors of the fifteenth century Jain community in Gwalior, a historical trade center in North India. Upon return, I will process the material collected, revising and extending my existing working edition and translation of the praśastis, eulogies, poetic colophons containing valuable socio-historical references and my previously published findings, into a new monograph which I will submit to Routledge’s Advances in Jaina Studies series (AP2).  

In addition, I will fully digitize and conduct a contextualized close reading of the five Jain Apabhramsha retellings of the classical Sanskrit epics (three Mahâbhârata versions of Yaśaḥkîrti and a Mahâbhârata and Râmâyaṇa by Raïdhû) (AP3). Informed by the ‘emotional turn’ in recent South Asian studies, special attention will here be given to the emotional regimes presented in these texts, which will be compared to the old Hindi versions of the epic of Viṣṇudâs, composed contemporaneously and in the same environment as Raïdhû’s and Yaśaḥkîrti’s, and to other Jain versions of these texts, especially in Sanskrit (AP4).  

I will present a paper on the Jain Mahâbhâratas of Gwalior at the next World Sanskrit Conference in Canberra (AP5), which will form the basis of a book chapter that I have been solicited to submit for a book to be published with Australia National University Press (AP6). My study of Raïdhû’s Râmâyaṇa will be presented at the next International Conference on Early Modern Literature of North India in Osaka (AP7), and will be published afterwards as a separate article.