EMERGING SCHOLARS IN JAIN STUDIES
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY VIRTUAL LECTURES
Departments of Religious Studies at UC Davis and UC Riverside
Friday, March 6 , 2026 | 9:00 - 11:00am PST
Register on Zoom here (After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about
joining the meeting)
SESSION I
Speaker: Venu Mehta
Respondent: Manisha Sethi
“Padmāvatī in Story: How Narrative Brings a Jain Goddess into Being in Gujarat”
Oral narratives do not simply describe the Jain goddess Padmāvatī; they actively shape her devotional
presence among Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjak Jains in Gujarat. Although Jain cosmology situates her as a yakṣī
and attendant of Pārśvanātha, storytelling repositions her as a figure of protection, intimacy, and regional
belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and textual sources, this talk argues that narrative
generates sacred authority, anchors divine power in local memory, and converts cosmological hierarchy
into lived immediacy.
Dr. Venu Mehta is the Bhagwan Chandraprabha Endowed Assistant Professor in Jain Studies and Assistant Professor of Comparative
Spiritualities at Claremont School of Theology. Her research centers on Jain devotional practices, especially devotion to the goddess
Padmāvatī in Gujarat, and extends to Jain–Hindu comparative theology and the ethics of forgiveness and aparigraha (non-
possession). She is a recipient of a Templeton Religion Trust grant for the project Forgiveness as a Path to Covenantal Pluralism. She
was a Fulbright Fellow (2010–11) and taught Gujarati at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Dr. Manisha Sethi is a Sociologist by training. She taught at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi until 2025, first at the Centre for
Comparative Religions, and later, at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies. Sethi’s research interests encompass a wide range:
from gender, politics and religion to law. She is the author of Escaping the World: Women Renouncers among Jains (Routledge, 2012)
and Kafkaland: Law, Prejudice and Counterterrorism in India (Three Essays, 2014). Her current work examines the relationship
between religion and law, and she is finishing a book on the evolution of modern Jain identity from the vantage of key legal moments.
She has edited a volume of essays titled Communities and Courts: Religion and Law in Modern India (Routledge UK, 2022).
SESSION II
Speaker: Mansi Dhariwal
Respondent: Nalini Balbir
“When Commentaries Speak Louder than the Canons: How Commentarial Sanskrit Renderings
Shape the Language of the Jain Canons”
This paper examines Sanskrit renderings (chāyā) of Ardhamāgadhī terms in the Jain canons and their
linguistic and interpretative consequences. While intended to clarify Prakrit expressions, many
commentarial Sanskrit equivalents introduce semantic shifts that distort the original sense. Through
selected case studies, the paper shows that sustained reliance on such glosses stabilises interpretations
rooted in Sanskrit rather than Ardhamāgadhī context, gradually obscuring canonical vocabulary. It further
argues that these renderings shape grammatical analysis by influencing etymology and morphology,
resulting in flawed interpretations. The paper concludes by calling for a context-sensitive engagement with
Ardhamāgadhī to develop a more linguistically grounded approach to Jain canonical language.
Mansi Dhariwal is an independent scholar in Indology trained in the traditional Jain gurukula system, with expertise in Jain studies,
manuscriptology, and classical Indian knowledge systems. Her research focuses on Jain canonical and exegetical literature and the
material culture of manuscripts, particularly libraries and archival traditions. She has worked extensively on manuscript digitization,
preservation, and cataloguing across Jain libraries in western India.
Prof. em. Dr. Nalini Balbir teaches Indology at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University and Middle Indian philology at the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes, Paris. The Jain tradition in its diversity (narrative literature, canonical texts but also aspects of contemporary Jain
practice) is her main area of research. During the last decades her focus has been on Jain manuscript culture. This has implied
cataloguing but also investigating colophons and paintings, the ways texts and visuals interact, the provenance of manuscripts and
collection-making. Her recent publications include A la découverte du jaïnisme (Paris: Cerf, 2024), a survey of Jainism for French-
speaking readers. She is now completing a full French translation and study of Hāla’s Seven Centuries (Sattasaī) as well as an
edition, translation and analysis of a Pali protection text produced in Southeast Asia, the Uppātasanti (with Peter Skilling). She is a
member of the Research Group of Indian Studies (GREI, EA 2120, Paris, https://grei.fr/project/nalini-balbir/)
