# The Jaipur Jain Translation Workshop **Presenter**: [[John E. Cort]] **Session**: [[Session 4. Jain Multilingualism]] **Abstract**: In the early eighteenth century, with the decline in Mughal suzerainty over northern and western India, Jaipur became a political, economic and cultural center of great importance. Many Digambar Jains moved to Jai Singh’s new city to take advantage of mercantile opportunities and to put their literacy and numeracy skills to use in the Kachawaha bureaucracy. They built dozens of temples and, more importantly for this paper, they precipitated a vibrant literary practice in the vernacular Bhasha. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Digambar Jain authors, many of them in Jaipur, composed hundreds (and if one counts pads independently, even thousands) of texts. Equally important in this literary efflorescence was that they also engaged in extensive translations of dozens of classical Digambar texts from Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha into Bhasha. Although these translators worked largely independent of one another, nor was there any overarching authority that commissioned or otherwise spurred their work, I nonetheless employ the term “translation workshop” to indicate the ways that this textual production in retrospect amounted to a combined project, and also the ways that no doubt the writers involved in translation were aware of the activities of other translators, both earlier and contemporary. Looking at the scope of this translation project allows us to see better how engagement with and translation of texts in older languages was a central activity in the development of early modern vernacular literatures, but one to which insufficient scholarly attention has been paid.