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104 : Sramaņa, Vol 62, No. 1 January-March 2011
that the appearance of these new biographical genres occurred more or less simultaneously in Jainism and Buddhism.2 : Admittedly, Indian medieval biography has little pretense of the facticity usually sought by the modern historian, which he bases in a notion of an objective past reality that stands outside the parameters of the text itself. However, as text as such, namely the fact that a given biography was written at a certain time and locality, the sources nevertheless possess historicity: as specific instances of writing, they provide insight into how a given personal narrative was formed at an age- and place-specific juncture in history. Just like the art-historian may distinguish the pictorial representations of a given motif chronologically to determine how the motif developed over time, the text-historian perceives how various narrative constructs formed and evolved, and these formations can be described as historical fact. Accepting this as the text's historical reality operates with a different understanding of historicity than proposing that the contents of a given biography depict a knowable, objective historical reality about the person being portrayed. It is this view of history that forms the basis for my study, and which makes the historical study of literature one of the most accessible inroads into mankind's knowable past.
The study of the appearance and development of personal narrative in Jainism is particularly significant for the general study of medieval religious biography in India. When personal biography began to appear in 10th-century India?, the other literary Indian religions all had extensive foreign contacts. Buddhism was active throughout Central, East, and South-East Asia, and Buddhist pilgrims from these nations constantly visited India bringing with them many outside influences. Hinduism had by then been carried widely into South-East Asia with a strong presence as far as present-day Indonesia. Islam, whose spread in India was just at its beginning, was with its ties to the Middle East still an outsider's religion, rooted in immigrant trader-communities. Jainism, on the other hand, had little presence - if any at all - outside of India.
