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LITERATURE
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This Desī-bhāsā or Old Hindi was thus throughout the medieval period the lingua franca of almost the whole of northern and central India, Rajasthani in Rajasthan and Gujarati in Gujarat being only a little different; the script used for all the three was also the common Nāgarī. The Jaina gurus of the period, true to their tradittion and their mission which lay with the common people, readily, perhaps unconsciously and automatically, switched over to the new speech in their writings. They themselves were drawn from the common people, wandered from place to place on foot, lived with the people, mixed with them, preached to them and catered for their religious and spiritual needs in different ways. Naturally, they spoke in the language the people spoke, and likewise composed their writings in it.
Another happy development in this period was that many educated laymen also took to writing and proved to be gifted poets and esteemed authors. Most of these lay pundits and poets wrote in the vernaculars. The result is that the Jainas have produced quite a large number of works on different subjects and in various styles and literary forms, in prose and poetry, in Hindi, Rajasthani and Gujarati. In modern times, besides the languages mentioned above, they have written books in Marathi, Bengali, Urdu and English also
The comparatively high percentage of literacy and education has helped the Jainas, inspite of their small numbers, to take good advantage of the printing press and other developments of the modern scientific age. Consequently, apart from western Orientalists and Indologists and non-Jaina Indian savants, Jaina scholars themselves have contributed to make Jainology a regular and an important branch of Indology and Oriental studies.
The number of Jaina literati, professors, research scholars, poets, novelists, and authors, writing on religious and secular subjects, and drawn both from the laity as well as the ascetic
