 I don't know, I got a little inspired when I decided to write up my proposal for this project and I wanna set it in context because I don't actually study nuns and I don't study biographies and so I was feeling a little bit out of my element this morning but I realized when I think on it a little bit that it's inevitable that I would have come to this point where I write this particular paper. So I wanna set it a little bit in the context of I've done a little teeny bit of work on biography. I'm very interested in, I like little booklets, ephemera. I tend not to work with the kind of the books that are in your library. I tend to work with the things that are sitting at the door of the temple and so I've collected these and I was very interested in how at the beginning of books as books become less expensive you start to have a wider variety of people who are honored in the beginnings of books because you can actually just any other, almost any person with sort of any cloud at all can kind of get their page in front of one of these books and so the audience is broader and the donors are broader and therefore the recipients of this honor are also a broader spectrum and so in the past I wrote about a couple of these. I wrote about one biography of a Jane lay woman in the front of a hymn book. I wrote about that where it's a couple of pages long. These are very short modest biographies in which she was conforming to sort of what does a great layman look like? She was a lay woman and they sort of, she happened to really participate in the discourse pretty effectively. Then I started really looking at them because I got a little obsessed with it for a while but I noticed that most of the ones of women actually can't conform because they were usually daughters or young wives and they hadn't done sort of donations and they hadn't done all the things that usually get you a biography and so that that second article was looking at how in order to find a way to construct their greatness they had to kind of go to an ideological idealization through Sati discourse. So this topic today is a biography that was handed to me and it's of a nun, Divya Prabhasriji. She is a Tapakach nun who is usually in recent history wandered around the area of central Maharashtra sort of from the gods east not so much in Bombay, she did a little bit of time in Bombay but not too much and I found out about her actually because she's very popular with the lay women who I happened to do my research with. She sponsored a few updans, they had gone and stayed with her and they all felt very strongly that I should get to know this nun particularly in the context of my project on Jay and Sati and so I went and met her and actually she's very charismatic, very, very smart and I thought oh this, this woman I'm gonna come back and meet but as I was leaving her guru sister who was in her family now because their guru mother was long dead so she traveled with her. Guru sister hands me this book and she says you need this book so you can understand everything about her and because I wasn't actually writing about it I stuck that book aside in 2001 and then this panel, this workshop arose and I decided to look at that book and I actually had not really, I kind of flipped through it a little bit back in 2001 but it wasn't what I was doing so I didn't look very carefully. So at the time they said you must go meet her so I met her and then they said she's gonna do a big Pravachan, come down for this and actually it was one of the largest events I'd been to in Pune, Jane events other than dikshas and parades. I think I counted somewhere between five and 600 people which for the Jane community in Pune was a pretty large gathering actually. Coming to hear her speak and it was about 25% men which is about usually what it looks like no matter what the event is and so it actually was striking to me that she gave this very erudites, it was actually a Naga Pravesh at the beginning of the rainy season and so she did a speech on the rainy season obligations and the obligations that were coming for Pradyushan and it was incredibly well attended and I was struck by it because as far as I knew Tapa Guchanans didn't do that but they didn't give public sermons and that they didn't give them in front of men and that they definitely didn't give ones with hundreds of people. I had heard them give small talks to them so I said oh she must be Karthikach, everyone's just confused and in fact in Pune that often does happen that the affiliations with Guchas is a little bit more fluid partly because there's not as many mendicans around so whoever's kind of a rounding charismatic gets an audience and I set that aside as oh they must have, that's interesting to me, I'm gonna go back and look at that someday. So when I opened up this book, I wanna talk about the book itself. The book is actually pretty well made for ephemera, it actually had a solid cover, it was color printed on the cover, it's a little unusual for these sort of handouts that you get at the door and it's 16 pages long and the main largest piece is a six page biography of her written by, presumably written by the person credited with writing the book which was Jane Layman. And alongside it you also had a short reflection on her greatness from her guru sister, another one from another Layman, a couple of short comments from her disciples, she had nine Sadvis that traveled with her not including the sister nun who also traveled with her and then there was a kind of a list of facts about her if you've ever looked at these sort of felicitations, this shouldn't be unusual to you. Actually reminded me of what you spoke about, some of those pamphlets that probably come out for the Tulsi thing that you're looking at, this is just a much more modest version and then at the end of it kind of, there's on the cover, on the insides, there were these two kind of mirrored photograph collages. One is a collage of her in the center of the kind of the universe with her Sadvis around her, her disciples around her and then the inside is a similar collage with who is it, with Boudi Vijay and the lineage leading down to her through the mendicant lineage of men down through to her grandmother Sadvi. Transferring it over to her. When I looked at that, I said, oh, no, we are dealing with Tapakach here. The lineage was very clear and so I said, okay, that's interesting and I went reading about it and this is actually how I got started, I went reading about it and I looked around and I looked at some biographies of Tapakach nuns which focused primarily on the fasting that these nuns would do in their expert fasters and that focused on their devotion, sometimes devotion to guru mother and grandmother as in almost in a familial sense and sort of vatsalya for their disciples. So that made sense to me and I didn't run into anybody really in any of the, and it's hard to find these nuns biographies in the Tapakach, they really don't have a lot of them but you run into them here and there and none of them really talked about education, scholarship or giving sermons and so I thought that was interesting and when I did look at one's written about Katergach Sadvi, say in fact, do talk about that and they talk about what great sermons they gave and things like that and I'll talk about that if I have time at the end a little bit more but so clearly that's a possible biography for Murti Pujak Nun but it is not really the Tapakach Nun. So that's what the, those were the models I was able to find to compare with because it doesn't look like the great biographies of the Jain monks at all, partly because it's much more modest and partly because what I found was that the requirements of representing them as virtuous through the lens of being female was very, very important even in this biography of this particular nun. So the biography itself was written on the occasion of her 50th anniversary of being a Sadvi or 50th anniversary of her diksha. She had been, she took diksha at 10 years old and she had become the head of this family of nuns that she was in charge of and was well respected as a scholar and so they wrote this and that was actually shared across the things that were written about her but also every time someone represented her to me they said she's really a good scholar which I found to be the case actually. So when we talked about it, when I looked at this, when I looked at the biography I read it many, many times and what I was struck by were the themes of what did they actually talk about in the biography? So if we can imagine, it divides fairly nicely into four sections. So the first section is very long and it's a long description of the village that her family comes from, the ancestral village of Alpa in Rajasthan and talking about how it's a place that produces women of great virtue and great strength. So it's kind of a classic, almost Rajput-like, description of the daughter of the desert, okay? And so an entire section on this, I mean a good little over a page out of six, a description of the girls carrying the heavy water pots and how strong they are at a young age and so forth and so on and how it produces women of particular strength and vigor. The second page, really, section of it, which talks about her childhood and how she came to take Diksha and this actually was interesting. She doesn't sound like they had a great time in her family. Her father had to move three times because of business failures. They seem not to have Ken particularly. They seem not to have any other relatives. They only relatives in the family seem to be. The mother and the father had lost two daughters in their maybe childbirth, maybe first days. It's a little hard to translate this section. And so she was their third child, another daughter, the last child they had, and they immediately moved after she survived her 40 days and then they moved again and they moved a couple of times around Maharashtra each time sort of leaving behind an abandoned business in some village and they end up in Karajat where it's not even clear how that was working out but the mother immediately dies when they get to Karajat and he remarries another woman. The father remarries another woman. It doesn't seem to work out. He decides he wants to renounce. But he's got this problem which is that he has a daughter. And now it's very interesting to me we're not dealing with a hagiography in a full sense here. It's definitely not crystallized yet because they actually represent her family it's not really so great. Usually hagiographies clean these things up. And so what we have in this is he says, the way he says he wants to renounce and it says in the text the only thing between him and renouncing was the daughter and the anger people will express if he leaves her. So what he has to do, it says what he has to do is he has to give his daughter in renunciation to free the way for himself. So, his name was Fajamalji. So Fajamalji put a stone on his heart and handed over his beloved daughter to the renouncers. And then according to the custom he was able to heroically renounce himself. Blessings for those fathers and mothers who do not have their children for one lifetime but are blessed to have them over and over again. So kind of glossing over the fact that he's done this slightly dodgy thing which is he sort of forced her to renounce. Which doesn't up, it's a little bit, we're not even really talking about Baldyksha here, we're really talking about something more like orphanaging her. And I think it's interesting that later in a six page biography they tell the story of Baldyksha again in which he does renounce first and she's so inspired that she follows him into renunciation. So I think it's interesting that in this very short biography they actually have two tellings of her Dikshah and the second one being although problematic in terms of he may be abandoned his daughter less problematic than forcing her into Dikshah. And so they haven't crystallized the biography yet if they have these two contrary versions neither of which are simple. We'll see, time will tell which one wins in terms of the discussion of it. But so she goes into, she takes Dikshah and she is brought into an environment with a mother nun and a grandmother nun who are described at great length as being the family she never had. And so she was very, very close to them and when they died, there's this telling phrase in which it says after they died Divya Prabhupashree decided to continue her duties as a nun. So there's a recognition in the story that in a sense she has to recommit because she really was being raised by them although she had taken Dikshah, full Dikshah she was then as an adult recommitting to being a nun and chooses to stay. After this they elect her to be the head of the family after the mother is, mother nun has died and the gachapati of their lineage notices her because she's quite well known as a scholar and very, very good speaker. She's a fantastic speaker. And so she came to his attention and he encouraged her to continue her scholarship and she builds up a kind of a repertoire of scholarship and she goes through, and it's this long list, it's very sort of, it's actually kind of, this is the one place where it's actually almost formulaic and they kind of give a list of the things she knows and she knows logic and argumentation and all the lives of enlightened beings and apparently she studies Haribhadra and they condense Sanskrit grammar and karma theory and pilgrimage site collections and collections of discourse on karma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it goes on for quite a bit. It's a classic kind of formulaic list of she has studied real stuff, right? They're making it clear that she, it's not like she read a few devotional poems and I say that because in the context of biographies of women they usually don't get credited with doing sort of the academic kind of scholarship but she really, they make a very big point, it's half a page, listing of all the various texts that she has read and she spent 23 rainy seasons in Paletana and Almdabad studying with the Gacchapati and then they said she also, because she was around, she was a Rajasthani speaker from Maharashtra, Marwari speaker and she also learned Gujarati, standard Hindi and then apparently also Bengali while she was going around and she was considered a great linguist and said that she felt it was very important, how do they put this? She felt that it was important for her to learn and adapt to the customs and manners of each place where she visited. Gujarat, Rajasthani, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal because in each of these ancient sites she was able to get to know Jainism more deeply so as she went around she felt that she could kind of acculturate to these and finally on the last page, they go back to her father and they start talking about him as a monk because they kind of mention him as also being a monk and they say that he'd always wanted to be a monk and that his renunciation then leads to the inspiration for renunciation in his daughter and they kind of credit him with kind of, the way that the term they use is actually polishing the gem of her so that she then also renounces and isn't it wonderful? He and his daughter both thought to improve their rebirth, how big a vision this was, how large, resolute firm his heart, how great his resolve, blessed in this way the history of her father's renunciation recorded and Alpa having seen this and being seen by the world so this little town being seen by the world that such a small village's ground produced such a glowing gem and so we have this interesting take on the father so then I'll talk about the other, she's very briefly and then I'll just give some closing comments so the other two reflections on them, one written by her guru sister, focuses primarily on how she took over the family after their guru mother died and it's a very intimate reflection of it but she says two things, she says one, the degree of her half century of selfless service and generosity could bind her the karma, Jinnanama karma so maybe she's some future Jinnah and that's why she is also so skilled in knowledge and then the second one was that what she learned from their guru mother which she did not learn at home she then passes on to the Sadhvish who come to her and so we have this kind of interesting way in which kind of a bad childhood is redeemed through renunciation. The other short reflection is by another layman, Dalipchand Gharia and he writes that primarily he says she brings glory to the city of Alpa she is truly a daughter of the desert, she excels primarily in knowledge and discipline and so again framing her in the language usually used to gendered male virtues in Jinnism so we have this interesting way in which by virtue of sort of being around long enough on a level she's sort of been and being a scholar by nature she is kind of gendered as kind of a almost male renouncer in a certain way and I think it's significant too that at no point in the entire set of biographies do they speak of fasting which when you read women's biographies they're littered with the fast that they've done in no point do they mention fasting in any of the biographies and yet before we make some radical feminist interpretation of it recognizing that her identity is linked very strongly to her father and also to the male head of the lineage the Gattapati who actually kind of marks her as special so we still have the standard kind of hierarchical procedures but she herself is non-conforming in her life and this biography actually reflected it isn't cleaned up to be more conformist and so it's a bit, I would call it an unsettled account and I think part of that is she's still here to actually be complicated and to be a problem if you will for the biography she is still participating in the telling of her own story and I'm watching this space to see how it plays out one of the, and then just in conclusion one of the things that I am very fascinated by in this account, in this little biography but also in little biographies in general is that they tend to be a kind of a pre-crystallized discourse these are written by people who are not widely educated the people that write this they haven't read all the other biographies out there to make sure it matches maybe they've read one or two here and there maybe they've read a little bit but these are unsettled partly because they don't know what you're supposed to say and surely if you read biographies that are more sort of edited and more crystallized, more polished up you don't get this kind of double Dixia maybe the dad's not a good guy kind of story that will be gone in the future we won't see that and just the same way I've noticed in other parts of when I look at the way that people tell their own story when it's in that phase where it's still being formulated it's still being created we have an opportunity to see what the options are and to see what possible worlds are available and we don't always get them in the permanent record but these are still possible worlds on the ground and so for a group on biography I guess my sort of last thing to sort of put out there is this idea that one of the things that we have especially when we have multiple biographies of a particular character is this wonderful opportunity to watch the way that human beings creatively negotiate, polish up, clean up and also dismantle our understanding of what constitutes a good life, thank you.