Pradyumna

Lover, Magician, and Scion

of the Avatāra

Christopher r. Austin

1
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CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1 Pradyumna, the Vṛṣṇis, and the Bhāgavatas 21
CHAPTER 2 Pradyumna in the Mahābhārata: Epic Episodes and
Ideologies 29
CHAPTER 3 Pradyumna and His Foundation Narrative in the
Critical Text Harivaṃśa 53
CHAPTER 4 Pradyumna-Kāmadeva in the Major Vaiṣṇava
Purāṇas 83
CHAPTER 5 The Jain Pradyumnacarita 111
CHAPTER 6 Late Developments of the Harivaṃśa and the
Prabhāvatī Episode 141
CHAPTER 7 A kāvya Casting for Pradyumna: The
Pradyumnābhyudaya of Ravivarman 173
Conclusion 205

Appendix: The Pradyumna-Prabhāvatī Legend

(HV App. I 29F) 219
Notes 241
References 279
Index 301
 CHAPTER 5 The Jain Pradyumnacarita

Introduction

Pradyumna is a figure of Brahminical tradition. We have traced the develop-

ment of his mythic identity from the sparse physical evidence of the pre-Gupta
period, through the MBh to the HV and Purāṇas, and will in Chapters 6 and
7 return to Brahminical materials: the late expansions of the HV and the work
of a thirteenth-century playwright-king. But in the present chapter I turn to
a different set of evidence that speaks to Pradyumna’s broader appeal be-
yond strictly Vaiṣṇava and Brahminical circles. For in Jain storytelling tradi-
tion, we find a vigorous and distinct Pradyumna cycle, attested from at least
the sixth century CE onward, which becomes a standard component of the
Jain handlings of Kṛṣṇa’s life and the Mabhābhārata narrative. Pradyumna is
granted an unusual degree of attention by the Jains, and is featured in his own
mini-epic, the “Pradyumnacarita”—a story tradition that gave rise to a Jain
kāvya tradition of Pradyumna poems.
There is no question that the basic mythic and literary stock source of the
Jain Pradyumnacarita was ultimately the Brahminical HV 99 episode, or at
least an oral or lost written rendering very much like it. But the Jain recasting
takes place within a broader backdrop of appropriations of the Brahminical
epics and the lives of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa. This tradition famously tends to sub-
vert and alter key details of the popular stories in accordance with Jain values,
while retaining much of their fundamental plot. Jaini defines this tendency
succinctly:
Even a cursory glance at the Jaina Purāṇas makes it clear that the Jaina authors
who composed them knew the Hindu Epics and Purāṇas well, studied them with
the attention worthy of a board of censors examining the offensive portions of
a story, and finally decided to rewrite the script in conformity with their own
doctrines and sensibilities. To the credit of the Jainas, it must be said that they did
not accomplish this project by any surreptitious means but instead . . . achieved
their goal by declaring openly that they were setting the record straight.
 (Jaini 1993, 207)

The Jain Pradyumna is in fact a subverted figure, refashioned in the manner

suggested by Jaini, so as to permit the communication of distinctly Jain values,
even as the basic structure of the HV 99 narrative is retained. This, it will be-
come clear, has chiefly to do with the proper place and role of sex and violence,
whose pairing and mutual implication are so conspicuous in the person of
Pradyumna. However, there is more to the Pradyumnacarita than a simple
reversal of Brahminical values. In what follows, I will also stress the ways in
which the Jain authors participate in the larger cultural and social values of
the wider South Asian environment. In the end it will become clear that the
Jain Pradyumna narrative echoes or resonates with certain features of the
Brahminical construction of Kṛṣṇa’s son, even though it is an ideologically
distinct and subversive treatment of the abduction narrative that functions as
a powerful foil for the Brahminical.

The Jain Kṛṣṇa Sources

The Jains have their own versions of the Rām and MBh, which are developed
within a unique mythic structure completely alien to the original brahmin-
ical sources.1 The mythic structure is that of the triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣas, or “Sixty-
three Illustrious Men,” which includes the chain of twenty-four tīrthaṅkaras or
“Ford-Makers,” of whom Mahāvīra was the last in our world-age. According to
this scheme, often called the “Jain Universal History,” there appear on earth in
each world-age, in addition to the twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras, twelve Cakravartin
kings and twenty-seven beings composed of nine triads: a Baladeva, a
Vāsudeva, and a Prativāsudeva—also a kind of “office” or recurring special
being in the manner of a Tīrthaṅkara or Buddha. Each time a triad comes into
the world, the same pattern is repeated: the Baladeva and the Vāsudeva are
always brothers, and they are harassed by and eventually defeat their enemy
the Prativāsudeva. The most famous of these nine triads are the eighth (Rāma,
Lakṣmaṇa, and Rāvaṇa) and ninth (Saṃkarṣaṇa, Kṛṣṇa, and Jarāsandha).2
The Jain renderings form part of an enormous mythic rescripting of Hindu
narratives that make of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa a regularly recurring pattern that runs
alongside and intersects with the lives of the twenty-four Tīrthaṅkaras of every
world-age. Kṛṣṇa and Saṃkarṣaṇa are in fact the cousins of the twenty-second
Tīrthaṅkara Nemi(nātha), or Ariṣṭanemi.
In terms of the actual texts that are governed by this triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣa
system, we may find Jain Rāmāyaṇas (usually titled Padmacaritas) focusing
on the eighth triad (these will not be discussed here), or free-standing
Harivaṃśapurāṇas focusing on the ninth triad and Kṛṣṇa’s life and generation,
such as the Harivaṃśapurāṇa of Jinasena (examined further in the following).3
Better preserved and known today are the more ambitious—indeed epic in their
own way—works that cover the whole cycle of sixty-three men, including Kṛṣṇa’s
life as only a small part. Representative here is the Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacaritra

112 | Pradyumna
of Hemacandra (“The Deeds of the Sixty-three Illustrious Men”) covering the
entire span of Tīrthaṅkaras, Cakravartins, and Vāsudeva triads (also examined
further later). One can therefore distinguish between Jain Harivaṃśa texts that
take the “Triṣaṣṭi” model as understood, but mainly focus on the time frame of
Kṛṣṇa’s life, and the universal Triṣaṣṭis themselves encompassing Kṛṣṇa’s life
within its treatment of all Sixty-three Illustrious Men. Finally, we must men-
tion a single text (also examined further in the following), the Vasudevahiṇḍī of
Saṅghadāsa Gaṇin, which similarly encompasses Kṛṣṇa’s life within a broader
narrative framework, although it is not that of the Triśaṣṭi. In any case, while
the Jain versions of Kṛṣṇa’s life occur in a variety of textual formats, there is a
consistency to the basic preoccupations and fundamental plot elements. It has
been suggested that this Jain Kṛṣṇa tradition may date back even prior to the
split of the Jain community, perhaps to the third or second century bCe (Jacobi
1888, 494; Alsdorf 1936a, 116–122; De Clercq 2009, 418), although no source
survives from that time. It is also possible that this tradition began once a shift
of the Jain community from Magadha to the Mathurā region had taken place
in the Mauryan and Śuṅga period (Jaini 1993, 209).4
Pradyumna becomes one of five major concerns in these various Jain
sources rescripting Kṛṣṇa’s life. The other four are the biography of Kṛṣṇa it-
self, the life of the Pāṇḍavas and select scenes of the Mahābhārata story, the am-
orous adventures of Vasudeva (Kṛṣṇa’s father), and of course the life of Kṛṣṇa’s
cousin, the Tīrthaṅkara Nemi. Following the designation of many colophons,
I will refer to this distinct Pradyumna cycle as the “Pradyumnacarita.”5 I ex-
amine five Pradyumnacaritas here6—three Sanskrit, one archaic Māhārāṣṭrī,
and one Apabhraṃśa—which range from before the sixth century Ce to the
twelfth century, all of them revealing quite a consistent treatment of the
life and adventures of Kṛṣṇa’s son: the Vasudevahiṇḍī of Saṅghadāsa Gaṇin
(82.8–109.25, hereafter Vas),7 Harivaṃśapurāṇa of Jinasena of Gujarat (43 and
47–48, hereafter Ji),8 Uttarapurāṇa of Guṇabhadra (72.1–177, hereafter Gu),9
Mahāpurāṇa Tisaṭṭhimahāpurisaguṇālaṃkāra of Puṣpadanta (91–92, hereafter
Pu),10 and Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣacarita of Hemacandra (8.6.110–263; 8.6.379–
8.7.133, hereafter Hm).11 All of these point to a uniform Jain tradition of story-
telling concerning Pradyumna, the differences being of detail, emphasis, and
sequencing. My method here will be to distill and present the fundamental
thread of the Pradyumnacarita shared across these five sources—being careful
to note, however, significant variations and details of particular sources as they
occur. All of these texts in some measure or another bind together the life of
Kṛṣṇa, the Pāṇḍavas, and certain elements of the Mahābhārata story, the story
frame centering on Vasudeva’s amorous conquests, the Pradyumnacarita, and
the life, renunciation, and liberation of Neminātha. With the exception of the
Vas, all of these episodes and characters are understood against the backdrop
of the massive cycle of Sixty-three Illustrious Men. There can be little doubt
that the Vas is the oldest of the five, and that it remained in some measure
or other a model for subsequent Jain narratives concerning Kṛṣṇa and the
Mahābhārata. But it will be impossible, and in any case immaterial to our basic

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 113

purpose, to venture into speculations as to the precise genetic relationship be-
tween the five sources here.12

The Pradyumnacarita Narrative

Once again I will present the basic common thread of the Pradyumnacarita
shared in these five sources. The fundamental structure of the Pradyumnacarita
is as follows (the division into seven is not native to the sources but a device
of my own):
1. Rivalry of Rukmiṇī and Satyabhāmā, conception and birth of Pradyumna
and Bhānu13
2. Abduction, rescue, and early life of Pradyumna14
3. Intervention of Nārada and fore-birth narratives of Pradyumna and
others15
4. Sexual overtures of Pradyumna’s foster-mother16
5. Conflict with foster-brothers and lābhasthānas, or “stations of acquisition”17
6. Return to Dvāravatī, boorish pranks, mock abduction of Rukmiṇī18
7. Pradyumna’s relationship with his half-brothers by Jāmbavatī and
Satyabhāmā.19
This material is shared across all five sources, with certain elements occasion-
ally varying, for example the fore-birth narratives, which Gu and Pu place first
in the sequence. All five sources build the story through embedded narrative
dialogues and multiple time frames of past/present life cross-referencing, and
so I have followed the basic sequence by which the majority (Vas, Ji, and Hm)
are structured.

Rivalry of Rukmiṇī and Satyabhāmā, Conception and Birth

of Pradyumna and Bhānu
The Pradyumna mini-epic orbits around, and begins with, the rivalry between
Kṛṣṇa’s two wives, Satyabhāmā and Rukmiṇī. In the Jain accounts, quite un-
like Brahminical tradition, Kṛṣṇa marries Satyabhāmā first. She becomes
jealous and vindictive toward Rukmiṇī when the latter joins the harem. Vas
(82), Ji (43.4–17), and Hm (8.6.59–76) begin their Pradyumnacaritas with the
scene of Satyabhāmā’s first encounter with Rukmiṇī, who has not been for-
mally presented to the harem yet by Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa decides to have some fun at
Satyabhāmā’s expense by setting up Rukmiṇī to look like a Lakṣmī statue in a
shrine. Hm has her hold perfectly still, and when Satyabhāmā inquires where
Kṛṣṇa’s new wife is, he sends her to the shrine to await her. Taking Rukmiṇī
to be a goddess, Satyabhāmā venerates Rukmiṇī and asks for auspiciousness
and beauty such that will outshine her new co-wife (tathā kuru yathā navyāṃ
hareḥ patnīṃ rūpalakṣmyā jayāmy aham, Hm 8.6.71). Satyabhāmā, of course,
is greatly embarrassed once Rukmiṇī’s identity as that very co-wife is revealed.

114 | Pradyumna
 All five sources play upon the rivalry between the two wives, stressing
Satyabhāmā’s pettiness (e.g., īrṣyāśalyakalaṅkitā, Ji 43.14) and Rukmiṇī’s virtue,
although Rukmiṇī is not above competing with Satyabhāmā to see who can
bear a son first to Kṛṣṇa. The stake in this wager is hair: she whose son is
born first will enjoy, on the day of the boy’s wedding, seeing the hair of the
loser cut off. Vas, Ji, and Hm raise the stakes on the wager with a promise
from Duryodhana that his daughter will marry whichever of the two sons
is born first (Vas 82–83; Ji 43.20–21; Hm 8.6.114–115). In time, Rukmiṇī and
Satyabhāmā do give birth to boys. In Ji, Gu, and Pu, this happens simultane-
ously,20 with the determination of seniority then established in a scene evoking
MBh 5.7: when the boys are born, the women’s servants visit Kṛṣṇa to tell him
the good news. They arrive while he is sleeping, Rukmiṇī’s servant placing her-
self more humbly at his feet and Satyabhāmā’s servant at his head. Kṛṣṇa sees
Rukmiṇī’s servant first, receives her news, and declares the boy the firstborn (Ji
43.35–38; Gu 72.157–159; Pu 92.1–2).

Abduction, Rescue, and Early Life of Pradyumna

Rukmiṇī’s apparent victory over Satyabhāmā is short-lived, for her baby is, of
course, about to be abducted. A celestial deity (devo jyotirgaṇe jāto, Gu 72.47)
named Dhūmaketu, flying along in the sky, decides to abduct the boy “because
of a prior hostility” (e.g., prāgvairāt, Hm 8.6.130). The explanation of this prior
hostility and of the past lives of Dhūmaketu, Pradyumna, and others, will be
recounted later. For now, suffice it to say that Dhūmaketu intuitively recognizes
that Rukmiṇī’s baby is his enemy from a previous life and he wants to be rid of
him.21 Ji and Gu seem to recall Śambara’s māyā in the original HV 99, for they
have Dhūmaketu use a mahānidrā, or magic sleeping spell, in order to abduct
the child (Ji 43.42; Gu 72.51); elsewhere he gains access to the baby by taking
on the form of Rukmiṇī (or at least dressing like her; rukmiṇīveṣo dhūmaketuḥ,
Hm 8.6.130).
In any case, Dhūmaketu wants this boy dead, and he throws the baby down
onto a rock to die of exposure.22 Jinasena is clearly familiar with the Viṣṇu
Purāṇa account here, for in his version, Dhūmaketu first considers throwing
the baby into the terrifying ocean with its deadly makaras and other creatures
(nakracakramahāraudre makaragrāhasaṃkule . . . samudre, Ji 43.45; ViP 5.27.3,
grāhogre lavaṇārṇave kallolajanitāvarte sughore makarālaye), but then decides
that exposure upon the rock will suffice. Dhūmaketu now departs, leaving the
resplendent baby gleaming forth from the surface of the rock for all to see. Ji
describes him as a “boy with the splendor of Anaṅga,” anaṅgābham arbhakaṃ
(Ji 43.52), and will make liberal use of the names of Kāmadeva thereafter. Such
names are common throughout the five sources, and overall they are used
more frequently than “Pradyumna,” although the Jain sources make no ref-
erence to any actual ontological past-life or incarnation relationship between
Kāmadeva and Pradyumna.

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 115

 In the ViP and BhP, the cast-away Pradyumna makes his way back through
the fish belly to the home of his abductor Śambara and is unwittingly raised
by him as a foster child. Here in the Jain sources, the malevolent abductor
Dhūmaketu disappears from the narrative once the kidnapping is done.
Pradyumna is then found, rescued, and raised by a benevolent foster father—a
Vidyādhara or sorcerer king named Kālasaṃvara (Pu: Kālasaṃbhava)—who
initially has nothing but affection for the abandoned child. This comes about
when he and his wife Kanakamālā (also flying along in the sky) notice the
shining boy down below.23 Kālasaṃvara descends and decides to adopt the boy,
giving him to Kanakamālā (Gu: Kāñcanamālā) to raise as her son. In most
sources, she then asks her husband to designate him Yuvarāja or crown-prince,
which he happily does, even though he has many other sons already. In Ji and
Hm, the Vidyādhara king names the boy “Pradyumna” because he is an abode
of great splendor (prakṛṣṭadyumnadhāmatvāt pradyumna iti saṃjñitaḥ, Ji 43.61);
in Gu and Pu, he is given the name Devadatta. Kālasaṃvara and Kanakamālā
then fly home to the city of Meghakūṭa, and the auspicious addition to the
family is celebrated publicly and with substantial festivities. Pradyumna does
not know that the Vidyādhara couple are not his true parents, and in all sources
but Vas, they do not know who he is either.24 The lad grows up to be handsome
and skilled in the sixty-four arts (kalāguṇaiḥ, Ji 47.21; adhigatakalākalāpaṃ, Hm
8.6.379) and begins to learn magic arts (Ji 47.22). In war as well, Pradyumna
distinguishes himself, for he conquers an enemy of Kālasaṃvara’s, earning
his foster-father’s increased esteem and affection (Ji 47.26–27; Gu 72.72–74;
Pu 91.10).

Intervention of Nārada and Fore-Birth Narratives of Pradyumna

and Others
Back in Dvārakā, Rukmiṇī and Kṛṣṇa are grieving the sudden loss of their
son. Nārada comes to the despondent Yadus and acts as their agent in finding
out what has happened. Nārada learns of the abduction and present situation
of Pradyumna from a wise Jain monk named Sīmandhara, who informs him
that Pradyumna has been abducted by an enemy named Dhūmaketu, who
bears hostility toward him from a prior existence. And yet the boy cannot be
harmed, because he is in his final birth (hantuṃ caramadehatvāt sa kenāpi na
śakyate, Hm 8.6.151). He is thriving under the protection of Kālasaṃvara, and it
is said in Ji that he will become the master of a magic power (vidyā) called the
Prajñapti (Ji 43.97)—something confirmed consistently in the ensuing narra-
tive in all five sources. Most important, the sage declares that the separation
of mother and son will last only sixteen years. But of course Nārada is curious
about the “prior hostility” of Dhūmaketu and asks to have this explained.
This requires a long narrative digression, so common in Jain storytelling,
explaining the chain of rebirths that has led to the present situation. This
centers on the previous existences of Pradyumna and his half-brother Sāmba,
who in the present existence has yet to be born to Kṛṣṇa’s wife Jāmbavatī.

116 | Pradyumna
These two brother-souls have been bound together for eons through both
human and divine births. Both Dhūmaketu and Kanakamālā or Kāñcanamālā
are equally tied up in the web of karmic reward and retribution. Ultimately
the entire string of births culminates in and explains Dhūmaketu’s hostility
toward Pradyumna, as well as Pradyumna’s great virtue, good fortune, and
invincibility. This type of Jain chain-of-birth narration is often complex and ex-
asperatingly dense. At times, only a thorough knowledge of the episodes from
a lengthier source can illuminate the cryptic brevity of another. In any case, we
see here three major moments in the soul-careers of the long-time brothers
Pradyumna and Sāmba, who have been bound together in countless births.
Agnibhūti and Vāyubhūti
Agnibhūti and Vāyubhūti were brahmin brothers, the sons of Somadeva
and Agnilā. They were arrogant, proud of their Vedic learning, and hostile to-
ward Jain renunciants. On one occasion they sought out a confrontation with
a Jain sage seated in the midst of a large assembly, but were humiliated by the
nobler wisdom and virtue of the sage.25 Seeking to avenge themselves with vi-
olence, they take up weapons and are on the point of attacking the sage when
a protecting Yakṣa spirit binds them frozen with his magic powers. The boys’
parents come, distressed at the news of the boys’ paralysis. The Yakṣa even-
tually releases the brothers from their embarrassing freeze-frame pose since
they have had a sincere change of heart, and the two take up the Jain path in
earnest, ultimately dying with great accumulated virtue and enjoying a heav-
enly existence in their next birth. Their parents, however, do not embrace the
Jain path and begin to have a series of low births.26
Pūrṇabhadra and Māṇibhadra[ka]
The next human birth of the two brothers are as the princes Pūrṇabhadra
and M[a/ā]ṇibhadra[ka] in Ayodhyā/Sāketa. In this existence, Somadeva and
Agnilā, their former parents, have now been born as an outcaste and a dog.
Pūrṇabhadra and Māṇibhadra[ka] learn of the pitiable fates of their parents
from the enlightened sage Mahendra and themselves then explain to the out-
caste and the dog who they once were in the past. These two are, of course,
still suffering the bad karma accrued by their rejection of the Jain path. Now
converting sincerely, they burn off their bad karma and have better rebirths: the
outcaste becomes a deity and the dog becomes a princess. The young princess
does not know of her former life as a dog, but just as she is on her way to her
svayaṃvara, she is informed of this sobering fact by the deity, her former hus-
band (Ji 43.156, Gu 72.35, Pu 91.5) or, in a variant, by the still-living brothers,
who have been updated on her new post-dog birth-situation by Mahendra once
again (Hm 8.6.195). She renounces the world promptly. The brothers mean-
while have remained pious Jains and enjoy heavenly births again after death.

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 117

 Madhu and Kaiṭabha/Krīḍava
In this pairing, the brothers descend again to blessed human births as
princes named Madhu and Kaiṭabha.27 It is in this existence that the soul who
is destined to become Pradyumna (i.e., Madhu) commits the deed that will re-
sult in the karmic-retributive abduction by Dhūmaketu. Madhu and Kaiṭabha
become rulers once their father abdicates and takes renunciant vows. Madhu
becomes infatuated with Candrābhā, the wife of one of his vassals, and steals
her away for himself. The vassal—who of course will go on to be born as the
grudge-bearing Dhūmaketu—is deeply aggrieved by the offense and becomes
a renunciant under a non-Jain ascetic and practices fierce tapas in an attempt
to control the pain of the loss of his wife. In Ji and Hm, this vassal first loses
his mind and is seen wandering about by Candrābhā, who recognizes the
madman as her former husband. Confronted with the results of his sin of lust,
Madhu becomes penitent (e.g., garhaṇaṃ svadurācāre kṛtvā, Gu 72.44); in Ji
he indulges in a substantial fit of self-chastising philosophizing about sin and
karma (Ji 43.188–198). To atone for this, he renounces the world and practices
fierce tapas along with Kaiṭabha. Thus, despite his sin of lust and adultery in
that existence, Madhu then wins a heavenly rebirth together with Kaiṭabha,
and finally is born as the son of Rukmiṇī. Kaiṭabha will eventually be born as
Sāmba, the son of Kṛṣṇa’s wife Jāmbavatī, who of course will maintain his spe-
cial relationship with Pradyumna, as he has done in past lives.28
As for the abducted queen, it is stated explicitly in Ji that she comes to be
born as Kanakamālā (Ji 47.61), Pradyumna’s foster mother and the counter-
part of Māyāvatī from the Brahminical HV 99. Hm only suggests this (Hm
8.6.404), but Gu and Pu point to this rebirth-identity by actually naming
the queen abducted by Madhu not as Candrābhā, as in Ji and Hm, but as
Kanakamālā (Gu 72.41), the name used in Vas, Ji, and Hm for Pradyumna’s
foster-mother. Gu and Pu then name the foster-mother Kāñcanamālā. Thus in
Gu when Kāñcanamālā begins to feel passion for the boy, she is described as
suffering from many perverse passions arising in her because of her past-life
affections (Gu 72.76). In any case, while only Ji explicitly links together the
entire chain of female characters Agnilā = dog = svayaṃvara-shirking princess
of Ayodhyā = Candrābhā/Kanakamālā abducted by Madhu = foster-mother
Kanakamālā/Kāñcanamālā, this is strongly suggested by Gu and Pu and is per-
fectly consistent with the logic and pattern of these narratives to understand all
of the female characters as fore-births of Pradyumna’s foster mother.
Nārada, now abundantly updated on the complete karmic backstory and
present situation concerning Pradyumna, takes his leave of Sīmandhara.
In Ji and Hm, he visits the Vidyādhara kingdom on his return to Dvārakā,
seeing Pradyumna himself in all his glory, although he does not speak to the
young lad or hint to anyone about what he has just learned (Ji 43.225–228;
Hm 8.6.258–260). Nārada’s full report and promise of Pradyumna’s return at
the age of sixteen brings joy to Rukmiṇī and Kṛṣṇa, who therefore experience

118 | Pradyumna
a “joy like that arising on the occasion of a Jina’s appearance” (prādurbhāvāj
jinasyeva pramodaḥ paramo ‘bhavat, Gu 72.71).

Sexual Overtures of Pradyumna’s Foster-Mother

We return to the Vidyādhara kingdom and to the most distinctive moment of
the HV 99 Pradyumna tale: the foster-mother’s sexual advances toward her
son. Pradyumna’s response here, however, is in the end completely different
from the Brahminical source and this, I will argue, is of immediate importance
for a proper understanding of the Jain appropriation of this figure. The basic
ingredients of this scene common to the sources are as follows: Kanakamālā,
overcome with lust for the boy, suffers the pangs of unrequited love. She lust-
fully propositions Pradyumna, who reacts as he does initially in HV 99—with
shock and revulsion—but remains unmoved by the ensuing declaration that
she is not his biological mother. Nonetheless, he recognizes an opportunity in
her offer: like Māyāvatī, she possesses magic power (vidyā), which she offers
to him in the course of her pleading. In Ji and Hm she offers more than one
magic power, but the “Prajñapti” Vidyā is in all sources consistently named
and remains an important feature of Pradyumna after he acquires it. Such
powers are understood to be personified goddesses (Vidyās) who accompany
their possessors like companions—more on them later. In Ji, Gu, and Pu,
Pradyumna interrupts the awkward dialogue with Kanakamālā with a short
visit to some wise ascetics, who explain to him the nature of these Vidyā
powers, how to use them, as well as a healthy dose of the Jain Dharma (Ji
47.60–62; Gu 72.79–81; Pu 91.11). Pradyumna thus benefits from the guidance
of realized men exemplary of the Jain path, who assist him in taking control
of the Vidyā (e.g., vidyāṃ sampādya, Gu 72.81). In any case, it is clear that not
just anyone may possess and control these powers, and yet he successfully
acquires the Prajñapti from this desperate woman who has essentially offered
it (in vain) as a kind of bribe to win him over sexually. She thus loses both her
magic and the object of her desire.
Through all of this, Pradyumna is revolted and scandalized by the perversity
(vaiparītya, Ji 47.58) of his mother, and has no intention of fulfilling her carnal
desires. But he knows enough to benefit from the situation, and in the end
refuses her advances by remarking that she is not only his mother, but now
his teacher as well, insofar as he has learned or acquired the Vidyā from her,
and so her proposal is doubly pernicious to morality (e.g., ācāryā tu bhavasy
adya vidyādānena me, Hm 8.6.395). Cheated and scorned, Pradyumna’s foster-
mother inflicts wounds upon herself and rushes to her husband, charging
Pradyumna with rape.

Conflict with Foster-Brothers and Lābhasthānas, or “Stations

of Acquisition”
Perhaps more than any other episode of the Pradyumnacarita, this scene admits
of the greatest variation across the sources and has no counterpart whatsoever

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 119

in the critical text of HV 99, or indeed in any Brahminical tradition concerning
Pradyumna. What is shared in the five Jain texts is a conflict of some kind be-
tween Pradyumna and his step-brothers, which the boy weathers with ease.
When this conflict takes place in the overall Pradyumna adventure, the degree
of hostility, and whether or not Pradyumna journeys through a series of caves
or “stations” in the course of his fraternal clashes, are all significant variants.
In the earliest source, Vas, Kālaśambara does not believe his wife’s charge of
assault against Pradyumna, but her sons do. They therefore attempt to have
him impaled on a stake hidden in the water of a pond called Kalambuga, but
he survives, thanks to his Prajñapti (Paṇṇatti) power, and kills them. In Hm
the episode is essentially the same and also ends with Pradyumna’s killing
of the natural-born sons of Kālaśambara—by means of his recently acquired
Prajñapti Vidyā.
The Digambara sources Ji, Gu, and Pu, however, expand this conflict into a
small sub-tale in which Pradyumna conquers but does not kill the brothers. In
Ji the internecine strife takes place prior to Kanakamālā’s assault charge. There,
the hostility of the brothers is roused by Kālaśambara’s naming Pradyumna
yuvarāja, or crown-prince. In Gu and Pu, meanwhile—as in Vas and Hm—
the brothers attack Pradyumna upon hearing of his purported assault against
their mother. In any case, Ji, Gu, and Pu pit Pradyumna against a gang of
ill-intentioned step-brothers, who attempt to orchestrate his death through a
series of thinly veiled traps, inviting him into some deadly situation or an-
other, all for naught, of course. The brothers dare Pradyumna to enter a deadly
cave, pond, fire pit, or some such hostile region; he conquers (often with the
help of his Prajñapti power) or otherwise impresses some creature residing
there (nāgas, animals, magical beings, and the like), and receives a valuable gift
from them, such as weapons, jewels, ornaments, magical items including new
Vidyās, clothing, and so on. Many of these encounters are related briefly and
cryptically, and are quite difficult to decipher. Ji names the dangerous realms
the “sixteen lābhasthānas” (Ji 47.44) or “stations of acquisition”—a kind of
ancient Mario Brothers video-game sequence of discrete victories in hidden
realms, each resulting in its own prize (see Figure 5.1). What is perhaps most
significant here is Pradyumna’s acquisition, through his various victories, of
the distinctive paraphernalia of Kāmadeva: a makaradhvaja (Ji 47.35), a pair of
earrings marked with a makara (Gu 72.107), a flower-bow (cāpaṃ kausumaṃ)
and the five arrows named Unmāda, Moha, Saṃtāpa, Mada, and Śokakara
(Ji 47.41) or Tarpaṇa, Tāpana, Mohana, Vilāpana, and Māraṇa (Gu 72.119; Pu
91.16). He even obtains Rati as a bride (Ji 47.43).
In Ji, this whole affair precedes the revelation of Kanakamālā’s desires
for Pradyumna and ends peacefully. The brothers see Pradyumna’s consid-
erable power and virtue and are mightily impressed by his victories in the
lābhasthānas. All return as friends to the city (Ji 47.44–47). Once the charge of
assault is made by Kanakamālā later on, however, they become belligerent. In
the end, the hostilities between Pradyumna and his step-brothers conclude with
a failed attempt to drown him in a pond. With the use of his Prajñapti power,

120 | Pradyumna
figure 5.1. Pradyumna Kumar undergoes the sixteen grufas or ordeals. Nemi
Purāṇa series, seventeenth century, Marwar, Rajasthan. Opaque watercolor on paper.
sourCe: San Diego Museum of Art.

he deceives the brothers, making them think he has gone into the water, and
they leap in on top of him, hoping to drown him. Safe on shore, he paralyzes
them underwater upside-down (Ji 47.74) and piles a mountain of rocks upon
them (Gu 72.125; Pu 91.17). Only now does Kālaśaṃvara—who, we must recall,
in these Jain accounts has never borne any hostility toward Pradyumna—attack
the boy. This battle is short (with Pradyumna clearly keeping the upper hand)
and is resolved as Nārada arrives to reveal the pacifying truth of everyone’s ac-
tual identity. The captive sons are released unharmed, and Pradyumna and his
foster-father are reconciled through Nārada’s mediation.

Return to Dvāravatī, Boorish Pranks, and Mock Abduction

of Rukmiṇī
Pradyumna now knows his true identity as the son of Kṛṣṇa; he is sixteen years
old and has come of age, having proven himself in battle, escaped the clutches
of the wanton Kanakamālā and mastered her Prajñapti power, and—at least
according to Ji, Gu, and Pu—also acquired all manner of valuable and magical
items from his lābhasthāna victories. Ready to return to his true home with
Nārada, he sets off with the sage and his Vijñapti on a flying chariot.
Practical jokes are now apparently what Pradyumna is most interested in
as he makes his way back to Dvāravatī, flying through the sky with Nārada
and the Prajñapti Vidyā. The first set of homecoming pranks occur when
Pradyumna spots a wedding train down below. It is now that he learns from
Nārada about the wager set years ago between Rukmiṇī and Satyabhāmā, and
behold, there beneath them they see the very procession of Duryodhana’s
daughter Udadhi (Ji 47.91; Gu 72.134) on her way to marry Satyabhāmā’s son
Bhānu[ka]—which of course means that Pradyumna’s true mother is about to
be publicly humiliated by losing her hair. Moreover, in some sources Udadhi

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 121

is truly meant to marry Pradyumna, for he had in fact been recognized as the
firstborn son, but his abduction made Satyabhāmā’s child the only candidate
for marriage to the girl. It’s time to rectify this situation and have a bit of fun
along the way: he descends and in Prajñapti-enabled disguise harasses the pro-
cession, appearing in inauspicious forms such as a deformed brahmin with
a dog (Vas 94) or a mountain-man (Ji 47.93); he scatters Duryodhana’s army
and, in Ji and Hm, abducts the girl (who quickly realizes she is not in any real
danger).
The five texts offer various other pranks played in the immediate region
of Dvāravatī prior to Pradyumna’s disguised entrance into the city. Thus, the
groves and pleasure-gardens surrounding the town have been prepared for
the wedding festivities, set out with decorations, food, and other auspicious
ornaments: these become targets for Pradyumna, who trashes them with illu-
sory monkeys and other apparitions. In Vas, Ji, and Hm, Pradyumna comes
across Bhānu himself, preparing to ride the ceremonial horse for his wedding
day. This becomes an opportunity to humiliate Satyabhāmā’s son, also only six-
teen years old and apparently not yet an experienced rider, by tempting him to
mount the wayward horse controlled by Pradyumna’s Prajñapti, which throws
him to the ground.
Once in the city, Pradyumna’s grandfather Vasudeva and uncle Saṃkarṣaṇa
become the target of the boy’s pranks. No one yet has any clue who the stranger
is. Vas and Hm introduce an intriguing detail betraying the influence of the
Brahminical Kṛṣṇa legend on the Jain Pradyumnacarita: on his way to harass
Satyabhāmā, Pradyumna, in the guise of a brahmin, meets a hunch-backed
girl whom he heals, making her straight with his magic (kubjikāṃ . . . vidyayā
saralāṅgīṃ cakāra, Hm 8.6.423). This is a clear and direct appropriation of
the Brahminical HV’s scene of Kṛṣna entering Mathurā (CE HV 71.15–35),
where likewise Kṛṣṇa heals a hunch-backed woman, the king’s personal spe-
cialist in ointments and perfumes (see Couture 2011; 2015, 214–259).29 Once
arrived at Satyabhāmā’s house, he takes the disguise and role of the dissatisfied
brahmin, never sated by the woman’s hospitality. Finally coming to Rukmiṇī’s
house in the guise of an outcaste (Ji, Gu) or monk (Vas, Pu, Hm), he begins
by tormenting her with the same ploy, using his magic to interfere with her
pious and sincere attempts to serve him hospitably. He relents, however, when
the barber sent by Satyabhāmā to cut Rukmiṇī’s hair arrives. The barber is
humiliated and abused (e.g., hung upside down at the city gate in Gu). In Vas,
a whole team of barbers are sent into such confusion that they shave each
other instead of Rukmiṇī.
By now, the odd stranger’s disguise is wearing thin, and certain signs
and omens are manifesting that point to his identity as the long-lost
Pradyumna: Rukmiṇī is lactating, and telling signs of spring are appearing.
In Ji, Nārada had foretold these signs as indicators of Pradyumna’s return (Ji
43.233–237). Pradyumna reveals his magnificent true identity (āviṣkṛtya nijaṃ
rūpaṃ pradyumno devasannibham, Hm 8.6.483) to his overjoyed mother,
treating her in Ji, Gu, and Pu to a magic show: he enacts, in the illusory form

122 | Pradyumna
of a toddler, all the endearing scenes of his childhood such as are beloved of
every mother, but which had been denied to Rukmiṇī. Finally, to make him-
self known to his father, Pradyumna plays one final trick: a mock abduction
of Rukmiṇī. In Vas, Ji, and Hm, he actually seizes her in order to spark a con-
frontation with his father; in Gu and Pu, he uses his magic to create an illusory
Rukmiṇī to the same purpose (svavidyayā rukmiṇīrūpam āpādya, Gu 72.163).
In any case, Kṛṣṇa attacks, and of course Pradyumna holds his own against his
father. Before long, Nārada appears on the scene, just as he had done during
the battle between Pradyumna and Kālaśambara, to announce Pradyumna’s
identity, and the fight instantly becomes a joyous reunion.

Pradyumna’s Relationship with His Half-Brothers by Jāmbavatī

and Satyabhāmā
In this last phase of the Pradyumnacarita, the attention shifts to the dy-
namics and tensions between Kṛṣṇa’s three principal wives and their sons.
Here the basic configuration established in Brahminical tradition is pre-
served: Rukmiṇī’s son is Pradyumna, Satyabhāmā’s is Bhānu, and Jāmbavatī’s
is Sāmba. However, in Jain accounts (where we find subtle variations on the
latter two boys’ names—I will use the Brahminical spellings), Rukmiṇī is a
junior wife perceived as a threat by Satyabhāmā, and as we have seen, the
birth of Bhānu to Satyabhāmā has been rather a matter of competition with
Rukmiṇī. In fact Bhānu, while born on the same day as Pradyumna, has
proven to be a disappointment to Satyabhāmā, who is jealous of Rukmiṇī’s
now-returned marvelous boy Pradyumna. At this point in the narrative, both
Pradyumna and Bhānu have grown up and been married, while Sāmba has
not yet been born to Jāmbavatī. In his past life, Pradyumna had been bound in
several births to a brother; in the present existence, this brother is not Bhānu
but rather Sāmba, whose conception comes about thanks to one final deceptive
intervention of Pradyumna.
What follows is a Jain spin on the old motif we have already seen in the
MBh (MBh 13.14) of Kṛṣṇa’s third wife Jāmbavatī beseeching her husband for a
son as wonderful as Rukmiṇī’s son Pradyumna, and more broadly constitutes
a case of the “bedtrick” examined by Doniger (2000). In the MBh, Kṛṣṇa
practiced tapas at the request of Jāmbavatī, and Sāmba was born to her as
a result. Now in the various Pradyumnacarita sources, it is Satyabhāmā who
beseeches Kṛṣṇa for a second son in order that she may outshine Rukmiṇī and
Pradyumna, for Bhānu has not satisfied her in this regard (e.g., pradyumnasya
mahāṛddhyā tāmyantī . . . bhāmā, Hm 8.7.8). Jāmbavatī meanwhile does not
yet have a son. The plot of what follows is clear enough in Vas and Hm, but
in the other three sources so dense as to be nearly unintelligible when read in
isolation.
Satyabhāmā has come to Kṛṣṇa to ask for her second son; Kṛṣṇa agrees to
fast, and the deity to whom he prays ensures him that whomever he next makes
love to will conceive a son as great as Pradyumna, and that he should then

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 123

decorate this woman with a necklace marking her as so blessed. Pradyumna,
sensitive to Satyabhāmā’s petty hostility toward his mother Rukmiṇī, hears
of Kṛṣṇa’s fast through his Prajñapti Vidyā (in Gu and Pu, he is informed
of the situation by his mother, who asks for his help) and decides to thwart
Satyabhāmā’s plans. He arranges for Jāmbavatī, toward whom he has kinder
feelings, to look just like Satyabhāmā (e.g., in Gu by giving her his magic
shape-shifting ring, acquired during his lābhasthāna adventure: mudrikāṃ
kāmarūpiṇīṃ tām avāpya sā satyabhāmākṛtiṃ gatvā, Gu 72.173) and sends her
to Kṛṣṇa’s bed-chamber. Taking her for Satyabhāmā and imagining that he is
fulfilling his promise to her, Kṛṣṇa makes love to Jāmbavatī, who conceives the
promised son equal to Pradyumna, namely Sāmba, the soul, now descending
from a heavenly realm, who had accompanied Pradyumna as brother in many
past lives. She also receives the necklace from Kṛṣṇa. The real Satyabhāmā,
oblivious to these shenanigans, then comes to Kṛṣṇa, hoping he will fulfill his
promise. From here the sources vary somewhat, but with the net result that
Kṛṣṇa makes love to Satyabhāmā anyway, who does conceive—but not a noble
son to equal Pradyumna. By means of her identifying necklace, Jāmbavatī is
soon enough discovered to be the recipient of the favor meant for Satyabhāmā.
In time, the two women bear sons: the noble Sāmba, Pradyumna’s peer in
splendor and valor, is born to Jāmbavatī, and to Satyabhāmā is born her second
son, named Subhānu or Anubhānuka.
There is no precise closure of the Pradyumnacarita in any source, but from
this point forward, our hero recedes quickly into the background as Sāmba
and Subhānu step forward for a short while, competing with each other in a
number of odd one-up-manship wagers. In the end, the pious Pradyumna,
whom we know has accumulated great puṇya in previous lives and has ex-
hausted bad karmas in this, his final birth, attains emancipation along with
Sāmba and others (e.g., Ji 65.16–17).

Coda: Pradyumna’s Marriage to His Vidarbhin Cousin in Hm

Above we have identified Hm as our latest source (twelfth century), and we
conclude our summary of the Jain Pradyumnacarita legend with a passage
unique to Hm but significant in light of the two remaining chapters of this
study. As in the Brahminical sources, Pradyumna marries his cousin, the
daughter of his maternal uncle Rukmin of Vidarbha. This comes about in Hm
8.7.38–85 when Rukmiṇī tries to arrange the marriage, only to have the offer
contemptuously rejected by her brother, who says he would sooner give his
daughter to caṇḍālas than to marry her into the family of Viṣṇu (dāsye nijāṃ
sutāṃ caṇḍālebhyo varam ahaṃ na tu viṣṇoḥ kule ‘pi, Hm 8.7.41). Hearing this,
Pradyumna and Sāmba then come to Rukmin’s city in the guise of caṇḍālas
with divine singing voices (kinnarasvaracāṇḍālarūpau, Hm 8.7.43), thereby
charming their way into an audience with the appreciative king, who of course
has no idea who they are.

124 | Pradyumna
 In the course of their performance, the singers mention to the king that
they have been in Dvāravatī, and in this way Rukmin’s daughter comes to
hear of the handsome Pradyumna, for whom she instantly begins to pine (tac
chrutvotkaṇṭhitā jajñe vaidarbhī rāgagarbhitā, Hm 8.7.52), unaware of course
that he is standing before her. Pradyumna and Sāmba then win the king’s favor
by taming a wild elephant, and ask for the girl as reward. For this obnoxious re-
quest the caṇḍālas are booted out of the city, but Pradyumna uses his Prajñapti
Vidyā to return and gain entry into the princess’ quarters. In her room, he
marries and makes love to her that very night, escaping at dawn. Her family
then read the tell-tale signs that she has married and made love to someone,
but she will not speak. Her father angrily summons the exiled caṇḍālas and
gives his daughter to them in a fit of rage over her mysterious indiscretion,
inadvertently fulfilling his dismissive words to Rukmiṇī and in fact uniting
the pair who are already bride and groom. Still unaware of what has actually
transpired, Rukmin soon regrets his hasty decision and begins to grieve over
having turned up his nose at his sister’s offer. Pradyumna and Sāmba finally
reveal their true identities by performing delightful music outside the city, and
Rukmin is gladdened to find his daughter married not to the caṇḍālas but to
his nephew, whom he henceforth holds in high esteem and affection.
In the next chapter I will argue that this is no insignificant theme: Pradyumna’s
mastery of the performing arts as a deceptive tool for gaining entry into the do-
main of a hostile king and acquisition of his daughter as wife. Bound up here
is the image of Pradyumna in disguise, speaking about himself in the third
person to a would-be lover whose heart is set on him, but who does not yet
recognize him. All of this points directly to Pradyumna’s second great narra-
tive episode in Brahminical Sanskrit literature: the Prabhāvatī romance, which
we examine in Chapters 6 and 7. For the moment we must remain focused
on the Jain rendering of the Pradyumna abduction, and ask what might have
prompted them to develop the Pradyumna narrative so substantially.

The Significance of Pradyumna for Jain Tradition

The Jain Pradyumnacarita presents us with a tale that is at once familiar

and peculiarly novel. On the one hand, it retains the core HV 99 narrative
of Brahminical tradition: Pradyumna’s abduction immediately after birth by
a hostile force, his upbringing in the home of a supernatural creature and
alienation from his clan, the sexual advances of his foster-mother that bring
about both the discovery of his true identity and his acquisition of a magic
power, battle with his foster-father and triumphal return to his rightful place
and family in Dvāravatī. The most conspicuous novelties are the boy’s abso-
lute rejection of the foster-mother figure, the extensive fore-birth narratives,
the lābhasthāna adventure and conflict with his Vidyādhara brothers, and the
boyish homecoming pranks. To an extent, these apparent innovations owe
a debt to the Kathā story tradition, which immediately inspired the Vas and

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 125

thereby fed into Ji and the three “Triṣaṣṭi” sources. What we have here, then,
is far more complex than a Brahminical narrative decorated with a few Jain
innovations. Nonetheless, the five accounts are so consistent in basic plot and
substance that I will in the following analysis speak of the Jain Pradyumnacarita
as a single narrative tradition.
Again, these Jain accounts always wrap the Pradyumna legend into a
broader framework featuring the Mahābhārata and whole Kṛṣṇa biography.
Proportionally speaking, Pradyumna is granted enormous importance here in
contrast to the Brahminical sources. That is to say, the number of verses spent
on Pradyumna in Jain sources relative to those concerning the Mahābhārata,
the Pāṇḍavas, and Kṛṣṇa’s life are proportionally far greater than those devoted
to him in the actual MBh and HV themselves. Why would Jain tradition single
him out for such an elaborate treatment and not, say, Saṃkarṣaṇa or Arjuna?
In what sense is the Jain Pradyumna heroic and laudable, and what exactly
did Jain poets see in Pradyumna that made him worthy of his own mini-epic?
Before I offer a response to these questions, which invite reflection on the
distinctly Jain character of the episode, I would first observe that the Brahmin
and Jain poets are equally engaged, up to a certain point, in a common labor of
myth-making that is expressive of certain cultural and social commitments that
transcend, or rather precede, ideological or religious distinctions, particularly
those concerning the nature of women. In terms even more pronounced than
her counterpart Māyāvatī, Kanakamālā is the deviant sexual aggressor and de-
ceiver. There need be nothing particularly Jain ascribed to this. Where men—
Brahminical saṃnyāsins, Buddhist bhikkhus, or Jain yatis—seek to preserve a
celibate withdrawal from the world, women can readily and quickly pass from
object of desire to malevolent seductress. We have cited Dhand (2008), Wilson
(1996), and others on this theme earlier, and will take on board others in what
follows. But such “ascetic misogyny” (Sponberg 1992, 18–24) may or may not
have anything to do with the ideological or soteriological particulars of the as-
cetic practice. The image of the sexually aggressive, deceiving female predator
intent on gratifying her lust upon a pious and celibate male is to an extent
located at a rudimentary level in the common experience of ascetic practice
when it is articulated by men, which can then be—as it is here—inflected fur-
ther through a more particularly Jain mode. As I turn now to these particular
Jain inflections, it is important to remember that “Brahmin” and “Jain” need
not always demarcate two mutually exclusive ideological domains: in some
respects they occupy the same space and share certain functioning premises
about asceticism, celibacy, and the nature of women.30

Pradyumna as Kāmadeva
Pradyumna’s identity as Kāmadeva in the Jain tradition is standard and univer-
sally understood. Jinasena is perhaps most explicit (Ji 47.25):
Manmatha, Madana, Kāma, Kāmadeva, Manobhava: by these names was he
known. He was not bodiless (anaṅga) but was called Anaṅga.

126 | Pradyumna
These and other common names for the God of Love are used for Pradyumna,
and we see in the preceding episodes that Pradyumna acquires the standard
heraldry and paraphernalia of Kāmadeva (makara-banner and five flower-
tipped arrows) in the course of his adventures through the lābhasthānas (e.g.,
Pu 91.16). But in what sense exactly is Kṛṣṇa’s son the God of Love, and why
would this identity have meaning in a Jain context? This is not clear at first
glance.
Although the class of being is less well known and the classification likely
postdates our sources, Kāmadevas are in fact said to be a recurring “office” or
station in the cycle of beings that includes, more famously, the Tīrthaṅkaras,
Vāsudevas, Prativāsudevas, and Cakravartins (see, e.g., Jaini 1993, 197).
According to this scheme, there are twenty-four Kāmadevas, the first of which
is the famous Bāhubali, the nineteenth Pradyumna’s grandfather Vasudeva,
and Pradyumna the twentieth. None of the Pradyumnacarita sources invokes
this scheme, however, and it does not seem that any of the authors under-
stood Pradyumna to manifest a recurring Kāmadeva “office” in the same way
that, say, Kṛṣṇa was a Vāsudeva śalākāpuruṣa. Nor can we say that the Jain
Pradyumna is an aṃśa (portion) of Kāma, nor is he Kāma “reborn” after being
burned by Śiva. This mythology is entirely absent from Jain accounts. The
Brahminical theological commitments entailed by such terms as aṃśāvataraṇa
or avatāra are wholly rejected in Jainism.31 Absent here are any notions of
descent-incarnation, or any divine-human birth configuration—so typical of
the epics and Purāṇas—in which a deity, with an essentially stable divine onto-
logical status, takes a temporary form on earth through aṃśa descent, disguise,
or as the result of a curse, and then returns by default to his or her true identity
thereafter. In the Jain view, all souls are continually transmigrating until and
unless liberated. A god may be born as a human, but of course he does not
then return to that godly state, like a worker returning home at the end of the
day, once he has died as a human. For the Jains, then, Pradyumna cannot be,
and is not, Kāmadeva reborn. He rather is simply Kāmadeva tout court, and this
fact is always front and center throughout the Jain Pradyumnacaritas. And so
why do the Jain poets preserve his status as Kāmadeva if they reject the funda-
mental theology that permits Pradyumna to “be” the God of Love?
Alsdorf takes up this issue, claiming essentially that the Jain Pradyumna-
Kāmadeva identity is not meaningful in any way: the names of Kāmadeva in
the Pradyumnacarita sources are, according to him, nothing more than a me-
chanical carry-over from the Brahminical sources (Alsdorf 1936a, 111). I would
argue, however, that it is not a blind retention of epithets that we see in the
Jain Pradyumna-Kāmadeva identity. Rather, the Jain Pradyumna both is and
is not an exemplary Kāmadeva, and a certain two-handed deployment of this
status makes possible a complex response to the Brahminical narrative and the
values it encodes.
In one sense, Pradyumna is the impossibly attractive, paradigmatic male
beauty. In describing his effect on Kanakamālā, the Jain authors participate
in the widespread literary conventions for describing the experience of lust,

the jAin prAdyumnACAritA | 127

 lovesickness, and so on (e.g., Pu 91.12), and take a certain delight in emphasizing
the power of the boy’s physical appeal by dilating upon Kanakamālā’s lustful
reaction to him: she is nearly insensate with desire (smarākrāntabuddhyā
kāñcanamālyā, Gu 72.76; kanakamālā ‘bhūn madanāturā, Hm 8.6.379, etc.).
The issue here, then, is not simply Pradyumna’s beauty, but the perverse na-
ture of a woman who would look upon a son-figure with lust. Gu (72.88–101)
in particular stresses the perversity of her feelings, following through on the
favorite theme in Indian literature of the lovesick woman, now framing it in a
shocked tone of outrage and with warnings against the dangers of bodily desire
and the evils of womankind. For Guṇabhadra, it is surely Kanakamālā’s wom-
anly nature that accounts for her evil behavior (sā strītvān nāvabudhyeta duṣṭā
kaṣṭam, Gu 72.101) in response to the handsome lad. Such views of women
are commonly voiced in Digambara tradition and by Guṇabhadra elsewhere
(Ryan 1998, 73), and persist today even in the discourse of Jain nuns (Sethi
2010, 51). Again, the issue is complex: to what extent is this familiar discourse
concerning women as sexual aggressors and perverse libertines distinctly Jain,
and to what extent a common heritage of the South Asian ascetic culture that
is invariably articulated by men seeking to control their own sexuality? In any
case, the first point here is that Pradyumna’s beauty and status as Kāmadeva is
instrumental to a larger set of concerns informing the Jain recasting of the ep-
AQ: “moreso”?
Please review for isode, and one elementary premise of this recasting is this: women are sexual
clarity. aggressors who will pursue any object of their desire—how much moreso one
so attractive as Pradyumna.
But of course Pradyumna is also the un-Kāmadeva. Whatever may be his
physical and sexual appeal, he rejects Kanakamālā, making her look the per-
verse fool, and that is rather the whole point. He does not conquer her sexually,
nor does he take her as his wife, but maintains a pious passivity and rectitude
in the face of her inappropriate overtures. This is the “right way” to deal with
women. And here is what is of prime importance for our analysis in the pre-
sent chapter: in the Jain Pradyumna’s horrified reaction to and rejection of
Kanakamālā (and all that she represents) we see the Jain tradition’s horrified
reaction to and rejection of the (for them) wanton sexuality and incestuous
abandon that is celebrated in HV 99 and all Brahminical handlings of the tale.
Pradyumna in HV 99 embraces and takes possession of this feminine figure
that he has drawn to himself so magnetically. In so doing, he emasculates her
husband and announces his sexual maturation, returning to strengthen his
vaṃśa. The Jain Pradyumna rejects Kanakamālā absolutely, and in doing so,
rejects absolutely the values encoded in HV 99. The Jain Pradyumna’s associ-
ation with Kāmadeva thus allows the poets to express an important point about
the perversity of sexuality and the ancillary purposes of violence instrumental
to the perpetuation of a family lineage. Jain literature often demonstrates a
hostility toward child-conception rituals (Granoff 2001), Brahminical funerary
and śrāddha rituals (Jaini 1998 [1979]: 302–304), and the whole complex of pat-
rilineal, vaṃśa and extended family imperatives celebrated in the this-worldly
value system of laukika Hinduism.

128 | Pradyumna
 This two-handed manipulation of stock-material, whereby the Jain
poets play both sides of the erotic, is not unheard of. In his analysis of the
Cīvakacintāmaṇi, a ninth-century Ce work of the Tamil Jain Digambara
Muni Tiruttakkatēvar, James Ryan (1998) addresses the issue of the Jain
tradition’s handling of literary conventions celebrating love and carnal pas-
sion. Particularly in the Tamil region, where the Akam love-genre so vigorously
informed the cultural imagination of the literate elite, such conventions could
not be ignored, even by a Digambara renunciant. Ryan shows, however, how
Tiruttakkatēvar participates fully in the genre, displaying mastery and com-
mand of often very explicit erotic imagery, all the while weaving in a persistent
theme of poison in association with women and the erotic. He thus created
exemplary love-poetry while communicating an orthodox Digambara view on
the dangers of love, women, and the pleasures of the body:
To retain his fidelity to the Jain creed and at the same time fulfill the assignment
he had taken for himself was no mean task. His solution was to present a work
that was so suggestive and rawly graphic that it turned sexuality against itself. By
a constant and empty parroting of the imagery of the love tradition, he created
what amounts to a skillfully poisonous parody. Thus, he on one hand could be
viewed with awe by the mythical Caṅkam poets themselves who could only ap-
plaud his clear evocations of the Akam tradition. On the other hand, the Jains
could only praise him because he had once again shown the poisonousness of
lust in epic fashion.
(Ryan 1998, 80–81)

Ryan reminds us how fully Jain literature can, and did, participate in the larger
conventions, concerns, and preoccupations of the Brahminical or non-Jain
world without yielding to the religious and moral values that may inform it.
Both Tiruttakkatēvar and the authors of the Pradyumnacaritas knew how to
communicate Jain values across, and by means of, widely recognized figures—
whether poetic or mythic—originating within largely Brahminical circles. In
the hands of a Brahmin Paurāṇika, Kāmadeva can act as a cultural-poetic and
moral-religious symbol for the celebration and contemplation of the positive
role of sexuality, passion, and even (when Kāma takes the form Kṛṣṇa’s son) vi-
olence, all of which have their place and purpose. But in the Jain accounts, this
same figure—and he must be the same figure if the narrative spin is to have
any punch to it—becomes the ideal means for a subversion of those values.
Sexuality and sexualized women here are the enemy, not the prize or badge of
manhood and honor. The boy exemplifies the proper response to the perverse
and dangerous feminine, refusing her advances and maintaining a steady
moral compass.

Kanakamālā and Rukmiṇī: Bad Mother, Good Mother

In examining the psycho-sexual and Oedipal dynamics of HV 99, I argued
that Pradyumna’s sexual maturation in the “safe space” of the demonic realm

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 129

permitted the resolution of an intergenerational conflict or tension. He
appropriates his mother Māyāvatī as sexual partner and kills his father Śambara.
While they are not his true mother and father, the drama plays out and resolves
in shockingly explicit terms certain dynamics and anxieties surrounding matu-
ration and intergenerational tension—and therein lies the boy’s heroic virtues
as virile, sexually potent male. By contrast, in the Pradyumnacarita the boy
wholly rejects Kanakamālā, and in no source does he kill his foster-father,
who moreover is a benign figure in contrast to the abducting Dhūmaketu. By
parsing out the hostility to the latter, the Jain version renders Kālaśaṃvara all
the more innocent and sympathetic a figure. The conflict with Pradyumna,
then, is rather because of Kanakamālā’s lie.32 This is the story of a young man
escaping the clutches of a deceitful, lustful, and dangerous female on account
of whom the father-son pair come to blows.
But two images of mother are operative here: the evil, sexualized Kanakamālā
or Kāñcanamālā, and the utterly innocent and truly maternal Rukmiṇī. Gu
expresses the perversity of the former most clearly (Gu 72.89–91):
89. Women, deformed by faults, deviate from what is fixed and straight;
they lead one to the perverse (nayanti viparītatām), or they deceive an
agitated mind.
90. The happiness and anger of such sinful ones comes about only because
of the gain and loss of what is dear to them; there is no other reason.
91. For mere females (kuyoṣitām), there is nothing that is inappropriate or
unseemly. This is what [Kanakamālā] did as well once she had abandoned
her [proper maternal] affection for her son (muktvā putrābhilāṣitvam).
The incestuous perversity of Pradyumna’s foster-mother is driven home when
the boy finally returns to his true birth-mother in Dvāravatī. After he reveals
his identity, Rukmiṇī bemoans the fact that she never had the joy of watching
him grow up as the blessed (dhanyā) Kanakamālā did. Pradyumna—now the
master of illusions—therefore puts on a magic display, enacting several heart-
warming scenes of his childhood (Ji 47.121–124):
121. Then he at that moment [appeared as] a child born just that day, with
wide-open blue lotus-eyes, sucking on the thumb of his hand.
122. Then he became a suckling infant babbling at the breast he had seized,
and likewise, lying flat on his back, bringing joy to his mother with his
fingers.
123. Then he became [a toddler] creeping along on his belly, standing up and
falling down again, holding on to his mother’s two fingers, creeping along
on a mosaic of jewels.
124. Betaking himself to games in the dirt, he clung to his mother’s neck,
giving her joy, his mouth gladdening her with his smile and sweet voice and
face [gladdening her] with its appearance.

130 | Pradyumna
Here the true mother and her natural maternal affections are cast against
the unnatural longings of Kanakamālā, who had actually witnessed these
charming boyhood scenes, but lusted after her foster-son all the same. Pu, in
particular, contrasts Kanakamālā’s maternal affection with her later lust: she
who had picked the boy up from the mud, dried his tears, sung him to sleep,
and so on, now desired him sexually—such are the dangers of love (Pu 91.11).
And so in the Jain sources we find more echoes or traces of the dynamics
concerning mothers and male children we have discussed earlier in connec-
tion with the work of Kakar and Kurtz. As with the generic consensus about
the nature of women, the rudimentary dynamics of psychosexual family life
in South Asia precede ideological articulation as Brahmin, Buddhist, or Jain
and can then be conjugated into the more particular terms of Jain values—in
this case, those concerning the dangers of sexuality and embodied existence,
neither of which is nearly as problematic in the Brahminical context as they
are in the Jain. Traditional Jain renunciant literature never tires of delivering
shocking revelations of incest and murder, whereby deluded characters come
to understand the awful truth about karma and its horrifying implications
about their past and present lives (Granoff 1995, 412). This literature does not
celebrate sexual vigor, virility, and the maintenance of a healthy patriline. It
seeks rather to inspire the renunciation of sexual and domestic activity, often by
reminding its male readership of the evils of women and the sickening truths
of karmic retribution and the claustrophobic proximity of souls, who might
be parent and child in one life and lovers in the next, or even worse—both in
the same birth.33 The Brahminical Pradyumna confronts head-on and resolves,
through his double sex-and-violence triumph over Māyāvatī and Śambara,
powerful anxieties and tensions besetting mothers, sons, and fathers. The Jain
Pradyumna escapes the clutches of the evil and sexualized mother figure and
learns at the feet of some pious monks (Ji 47.60–62; Gu 72.79–81; Pu 91.11)
about the karmic causes that have brought her to this low state. Enlightened
to the truth of things by Nārada and especially by this group of celibate male
authorities, he soon returns to his true mother, and quite literally to an infan-
tile state when performing his little nursery magic show for her.
If there is any doubt that the Jain authors were consciously responding to
and subverting the Brahminical Oedipal dynamic of HV 99, we have only to
remember how Pradyumna chooses to reveal himself to his true father: by
mock-abducting Rukmiṇī and fighting briefly with Kṛṣṇa over her. This playful
gesture points back directly to the social-sexual anxieties that drive the HV
99 narrative, and underscores the Jain response thereto in which Pradyumna
resolves the tension, rejects Kanakamālā completely, and makes a joke of such
a mother-son relationship, pointing up its perversity. This is, in fact, what the
entire Jain account of Pradyumna itself achieves. The perverse feminine and
her wayward sexuality are rejected, and the safe maternal feminine has been
reclaimed with a clever and defused mock-abduction that even Kṛṣṇa finds
amusing (Pu 92.3). The figure of Nārada ties this farce back to the initial scene
of actual conflict and danger: he intervenes in both cases, revealing the true

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 131

identities of Pradyumna to his foster and biological father and thereby also
(uncharacteristically) helping to resolve the discord that he usually delights in
fomenting in Brahminical sources.

Explanatory Role of Former Births and Puṇya

One of the more distinctive additions we have seen to the basic HV 99 plot is
the elaboration of past lives. This is altogether typical of Jain storytelling, but
we must understand how it functions here to make of Pradyumna the partic-
ular kind of hero that he is.
First we should say that, in the Brahminical accounts, fore-births do play an
important role: at the end of the HV 99 narrative, Kṛṣṇa reassures everyone
that it is perfectly acceptable for Pradyumna to take Māyāvatī as his wife, for he
is Kāma and she is Rati, and moreover she never truly was Śambara’s wife, but
only deluded him with a māyārūpa (HV 99.46–47). This explanatory posture
is not so much about karma as it is about identities, true and false: Pradyumna
as son and Māyāvatī as mother were false; Kāmadeva as husband and Rati as
wife are true. Kṛṣṇa’s revealing of the fore-births or prior existences of the
pair in HV 99 is clarifying, legitimating, and fully satisfying for all. It explains
and justifies everything, and most importantly valorizes their love and sexual
union. Here in the Jain sources, fore-births play a similar role in explaining
and clarifying identities, but with a very different net result that is subversive
of the encoded message regarding sexuality and passion in HV 99.
The Pradyumnacarita’s fore-birth materials first of all account for
Pradyumna’s being abducted far more thoroughly than do the Brahminical
sources (e.g., mamaiṣa hanteti, ViP 5.27.2). But more important here is the fe-
male character tied up in Pradyumna’s fore-births: Agnilā, who becomes a fe-
male dog, then a princess who renounces early in life, then Candrābhā, the
queen whom Madhu abducts. Given what we have just said about the Jain
handling of the Oedipal dynamic, this detail should not escape us: Madhu lusts
after and abducts a woman who was once his biological mother (Agnilā, when
he was Agnibhūti), and so is himself abducted by Dhūmaketu, the rebirth of
the swindled husband, and lusted after by her as Kanakamālā/Kāñcanamālā,
whose affection for him carries over from her prior birth (kāñcanamālayā jan
māntarāgatasnehakṛtānekavikārayā, Gu 72.76). Madhu, however, does not die a
recalcitrant sinner: he recognizes his great sin (esp. Ji 43.188–198) and expiates
most of it through ferocious tapas. Consequently, Pradyumna is born with
enormous merit and is in his final birth (e.g., hantuṃ caramadehatvāt sa kenāpi
na śakyate, Hm 8.6.151). The boy’s stock of puṇya is frequently invoked as the
cause of his good fortune (e.g., Gu 72.52, Ji 43.47) and uncanny ability to turn
threat to advantage, exemplified particularly by his victories and acquisitions
in the sixteen or so danger-zones. Thus, while he is destined to suffer the final
punishment-fits-the-crime expiations of his former sins of lust, theft, and ul-
timately incestuous desire, he is equipped with sufficient merit and moral
strength to do so. And as we have just seen, Pradyumna seems to have a last

132 | Pradyumna
laugh over this whole Oedipal drama, mock-abducting his biological mother
yet again in Dvāravatī. This time, of course, he is not driven by karma or kāma,
but rather makes a caricature of the whole affair once he is safely on the far
side of the divide separating deluded and karmically driven souls from those
destined for liberation in this lifetime. In a way that almost resonates with
what we have said above about Kṛṣṇa, Pradyumna, and kāma in the BhP, by
being Kāma himself now, Pradyumna is the last soul on earth susceptible to
passion. Women, even his foster-mother, may fall at his feet in passionate
longing, but he is now the absolute master and embodiment of desire and as
such can never again be its victim.
Clearly the fore-birth materials serve to flesh out the “why” of Pradyumna’s
experience. But it is important to recognize how they allow the Jain poets to
construct Pradyumna’s heroism and to turn the Pradyumna story on its head,
pointing in quite the opposite direction that Kṛṣṇa points at the conclusion
of HV 99: the boy is not a hero because he reclaimed, through his great sex
appeal and virile power, his rightful identity as lover and husband of Rati, but
because he finally took total mastery of the destructive powers of love and de-
sire themselves, which are so dangerous that they might lead a mother and son
into a sexual encounter. Even in his lifetime as Madhu, Pradyumna had already
begun this moral battle. The Brahminical Pradyumna conquers Māyāvatī sex-
ually, regaining his past-life wife thereby; the Jain Pradyumna takes absolute
control over a sexuality hounding him from past existences and so in the
end is able to attain liberation under the Tīrthaṅkara Nemi. Thus both the
Brahminical and Jain accounts depend upon and make reference to past lives
in their construction of Pradyumna’s heroic nature. In so doing, they each
make very different comments about the proper place of love and desire in
human experience.

Pradyumna as Vidyādhara and Deceiver

Finally, we see here the familiar motif of the transfer of magic power from the
foster-mother figure to the boy. Kanakamālā is a Vidyādharā (the appellation
is functionally equivalent to māyā-vatī), or magic-possessing being, and offers
her Vidyā magic to him when pleading her case, which he cleverly appropriates
from her without reciprocating. Vidyā is not quite synonymous with māyā,
however. The Vidyādhara, male or female, is a special kind of magician in
the South Asian context (see, e.g., Van Buitenen 1958, 308–309), and more
particularly in the Jain context, Cort points out the following: “[r]eferences
to vidyās (Prakrit vijjā) are found at the earliest levels of Jainism. The vidyās
are discussed in many of the early Jaina texts as magical powers which can
be obtained through meditation and ascetic practice” (Cort 1987, 237–238).
And yet these powers are personified as goddesses, thus making up one of
three categories of the divine feminine in Jainism: ūrdhvaloka (Lakṣmī and
Sarasvatī), tiryagloka (the sixteen tantric Vidyādevīs), and adholoka goddesses
or yakṣīs (Cort 1987, 236).34 The magic power with which Pradyumna comes

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 133

to be endowed is an earthly embodiment of Prajñapti, one of the sixteen
tiryagloka Vidyādevīs. Such powers are in Jain sources said to have been pos-
sessed by other figures appropriated from Brahminical tradition (e.g., Nārada
acquires them at the age of eight, Hm 8.5.39; Couture and Chojnacki 2014,
224, 438) and have a distinctly tantric flavor to them, although we cannot enter
here into the likely very rich subsidiary issue of what role Jain tantra plays in
the Pradyumnacarita.35
In the Brahminical HV 99, Pradyumna becomes a master of Māyāvatī’s
māyā, which as we have seen can be read both as a generous initiative on
her part and as an emasculation of the māyin Śambara. However one reads
it, the Brahminical Pradyumna is māyically empowered through the mag-
netic effect of his sexuality and his affirmation thereof by accepting Māyāvatī
as his wife. To accept her as lover is to accept and appropriate her powers
away from, and so emasculate, her husband. But in Jain accounts, Pradyumna
rejects Kanakamālā and wins nonetheless the Prajñapti Vidyā, who proves so
fundamental to him thereafter. In the preceding quote, Cort refers to “ascetic
practice” as a means for acquiring Vidyās, but Sethi offers a narrative anecdote
from Hemacandra’s Sthavirāvalicarita that sharpens this further: two brothers,
Vidyunmalin and Megharatha, seek to gain Vidyā goddesses, and “[t]he for-
mula to gain these powers is to cohabit with a woman while preserving one’s
chastity” (Sethi 2010, 53). As the story unfolds, one brother succeeds in doing
this and the other does not.
The point is clear here: men can “conquer” feminine powers by resisting
sexuality. To fail in one’s celibacy is to be conquered by women; to pre-
serve it can bring mastery of feminine powers of magic. Once Pradyumna
resists Kanakamālā and acquires her Prajñapti, he seeks out tutelage under
male ascetic authorities who assist him in controlling the Vidyā (e.g., jñātvā
vidyāprasādhane hetuṃ tadupadeśena, Gu 72.80). We see in all this, once again,
a set of conceptions and associations that are so widespread they can hardly
be called Brahminical, Buddhist, or Jain: men seek to control women; male
celibacy is precarious and its fragility is often projected into a demonization
of the desired feminine object; women are deceivers and masters of illusion.
But at a second level, a more distinctly Jain ideology articulates such notions
more finely. And so what “controlling women” means in the Brahminical and
Jain cases are fundamentally opposed (total sexual appropriation versus abso-
lute celibate resistance), but have the same net result (mastery of the feminine
māyā or vidyā). Once empowered by the Vidyā, Pradyumna emerges victorious
and laden with blessings through the lābhasthāna trials and takes a raucous de-
light in his power of deception, teasing his family with his disguises, clipping
Satyabhāmā’s and Bhānu’s wings out of filial devotion to Rukmiṇī, and putting
on a magic show of his childhood days for his mother. The Jain Pradyumna,
then, as the Brahminical, is marked by the special ability to deceive and resist
deception, and this is tied directly to his mastery of or over the feminine, which
can mean one of two very different things.

134 | Pradyumna
Joseph, Potiphar’s Wife, and the Chaste Youth Motif

In this volume my primary concern is to assemble intelligibly the key Sanskrit

sources surrounding Pradyumna and to set them in a meaningful way in the
larger cultural and religious South Asian context. This requires an engage-
ment with themes in scholarship on South Asian religion that are so substan-
tial that I must navigate cautiously, always cognizant of the limits upon my
ability to pursue the secondary issues. How much less, then, am I confident
in my ability to adequately take up related issues and scholarship addressing
a wider global context. But the following must at least be marked out, if only
as a matter for future research: the Jain handling of Pradyumna seems to par-
ticipate in a story cycle that extends well beyond South Asia. In 1923 Maurice
Bloomfield, writing of the story of Joseph (Genesis 37: 39–45) and its “Hindu”
(i.e., South Asian) expressions, noted:
The story of Joseph belongs to the type known in general literature as the
Fortunatus type. The child of fortune is possessed of intrinsic, congenital, mag-
ically bestowed qualities, that point to an abnormally high career. This threatens
to interfere with others’ fortunes, or arouses others’ envy and malice. He is
also endowed with unusual bodily charms, which may entangle him in amo-
rous adventures that are, by the terms of his character, foreign to his inclination.
These he invariably resists: Fortunatus is not only lucky, but also good. Neither
persecution, nor women’s lure, can do him permanent harm, or bar the way to
his glorious destiny.
(Bloomfield 1923, 141)

The biblical Joseph story does indeed share a few crucial motifs with the
Pradyumnacarita. Alsdorf gestures toward this very briefly (Alsdorf 1936a,
111) but does not pursue it.36 Joseph falls into a rivalry with a group of brothers;
he is thrown into a pit by them, and later into jail, but in a sense turns these
threats to advantage, and most distinctly, the handsome young man resists
the attempted seduction by Potiphar’s wife, is therefore unjustly charged by
her with attempted assault, and he is consequently imprisoned. He eventually
rises again to prominence and enormous power in Egypt due to his pious and
virtuous nature, and his special ability to interpret dreams.
There is no question that the tale manifested itself in various ways in the
subsequent Abrahamic tradition (Goldman 1995), and likely has roots in an-
cient Egypt (Yohannan 1968, 10–14), and of course has many well-known
echoes, if not variants, such as the Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus myth. While
the motif of men resisting the sexual advances of women, even step-mothers,
might be a universal one, requiring no hypothesis of communication or deri-
vation from one narrative source to another, a convincing case has been made
for doing so and for placing this story cycle in a larger network of world liter-
ature, including South Asian (Yohannan 1968, 231–246). The literature I have
reviewed here is not disconnected from this network, although Yohannan

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 135

has no awareness of the Jain materials. The most important link between the
Jain stories and the wider South Asian, and even global, body of “Fortunatus”
narratives is the oldest of the five sources examined in the preceding—the
Vas. Vas is a Jain rendering of the now lost Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya, best
known through its Kashmirian reincarnations as Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgara
and Kṣemendra’s Bṛhatkathāmañjari, and its Nepalese reincarnation as
Budhasvāmin’s Bṛhatkathāślokasaṅgraha. This “Kathā” or story tradition, asso-
ciated especially with the lost Guṇāḍhya collection of tales, is clearly tied in to a
lively and highly mobile culture of oral and written storytelling in South Asia.
Budhasvāmin’s rendering in particular is taken by Lacôte and Renou (1908–
1929) to approximate most closely the original Bṛhatkathā of Guṇāḍhya, and
the Jain Vas corresponds far more closely to Budhasvāmin than to Somadeva
or Kṣemendra (Jagdishchandra Jain 1977, 4–10; see also Nelson 1978). As such,
one of the most authoritative and influential sources of the Pradyumnacarita is
closely connected with a storytelling tradition that we know to have proliferated
across and even beyond South Asia. The Pradyumnacarita is thus by no means
the product of a simple Jain elaboration of HV 99, with new details concocted
out of thin air.
But to help restrict the discussion to the South Asian context, I refer again to
Bloomfield—who like Yohannan had no familiarity with the Pradyumnacarita
as such—and the many examples he cites of the motif in Buddhist and Jain lit-
erature, as well as in the Kathā tradition. Bloomfield points out the frequency of
the step-mother pattern in Jain literature (Bloomfield 1923, 150–159). One such
tale, taken from the Samarādityasaṃkṣepa, involves the precise configuration
of chaste handsome youth—going by the name Sanatkumāra, which we recall
is Pradyumna’s old aṃśa tag-name from the MBh—repelling the inappropriate
advances of a step-mother figure, who likewise scratches herself and charges
the boy with rape. He is sent to be executed, but is let free by the executioner,
and the boy eventually becomes the Cakravartin Vidhyādhara Sanatkumāra.
I will not pursue here the obvious Jain connection between the character of
Kṛṣṇa’s son Pradyumna and the Universal Monarch Sanatkumāra.37 Suffice it
to say, Bloomfield’s example coordinates perfectly with the Pradyumnacarita
examined earlier, and even shows us that the Jains remembered the name
Sanatkumāra (a name suggesting a young lad who always preserves his chas-
tity) in association with this figure.
Finally, the Buddhist examples offered by Bloomfield (1923, 145–150) are
noteworthy and demonstrate clearly that the Jain handling of Pradyumna took
place in a larger (at least) South Asian storytelling context where a certain stock
of narrative material circulated freely between Brahminical, Buddhist, and Jain
sources. One example, noted as well by Yohannan (1968, 231–246) comes from
the Aśokāvadāna:38 Aśoka’s handsome son Kunāla, who is married, is sexually
approached by his step-mother Tiṣyarakṣitā, but he rejects her. She is later
able to plot her revenge upon Kunāla, which takes the form of having his eyes
gouged out. Kunāla wanders with his wife in the guise of a musician, and even-
tually returns home, where he plays the lute, making his true identity gradually

136 | Pradyumna
understood thereby. Tiṣyarakṣitā is burned alive by Aśoka for her deed. The
tale is not a close match for the Pradyumnacarita, but the basic step-mother
motif is there, as is that of the performer in disguise gradually revealing him-
self, which is found in Hm and which will dominate our study in Chapters 6
and 7. And one conspicuous detail of this Kunāla legend betrays some com-
munication with Jain narrative, however indirect: the name of Kunāla’s wife
is Kāñcanamālā.
A second Buddhist example noted by Bloomfield is the Mahāpadumajātaka,
in which the Bodhisattva, named Paduma, must suffer the usual encounter: he
is approached by his step-mother; he rejects her and she scratches herself and
charges him with assault. In his rage, his father throws him off a cliff, but
supernatural powers intervene and he eventually becomes an ascetic. The
Buddha relates this former birth of his in order to account for the fact that
a woman named Ciñcamāṇavikā, working on behalf of those hostile to the
Dharma, has attempted to bring dishonor to the Buddha by feigning preg-
nancy and saying that the child is the Buddha’s. While this Jātaka has nothing
to do with the Ghaṭa Jātaka (discussed in Chapter 1) or with Kṛṣṇa or his son,
the fact that the central character’s name is Paduma shows clearly that a certain
story tradition was circulating in which the step-mother motif was tied closely
to the name Pradyumna.
I do not wish to suggest that there is any simple trajectory from HV 99, to
the Jain Pradyumnacarita, to the Buddhist Jātakas. Whatever is happening here
is far more complex than that. Nor will I pursue further the possible place of
Pradyumna in the global tradition of amorous step-mother tales, except to say
that the likely link is the South Asian Bṛhatkathā story tradition, broadly un-
derstood, which is best represented in the Jain materials by Vas. That there is
some connection seems highly likely, and so far as I can see, Alsdorf is thus far
the only scholar to recognize this. This is chiefly because the Pradyumnacarita
is so poorly known, but surely would have been seized upon by Bloomfield
and Yohannan had they been familiar with it. I flag these issues for potential
future exploration and permit Bloomfield to have the last word on the subject.
He summarizes the common elements, found as much in Genesis as in the
Pradyumnacarita:
(1) The hero of the story is of beautiful person and character. (2) The wayward
wife is unable to resist his charms. (3) The hero rejects her overtures. (4) The
woman shams virtue, and constructs a “frame-up” which takes in her husband.
(5) Out of consequent danger, misfortune, or degradation, the hero emerges to
vindication and fortune.
(Bloomfield 1923, 166)

the jAin prAdyumnACAritA | 137

Conclusion

The Jain treatment of Pradyumna we have examined here in our five sources
is only the beginning of a Jain literary tradition that continues well into the
modern period. Even before Hemacandra composed his Triṣaṣṭi, we see
emerging discrete Jain kāvyas celebrating the adventures of Pradyumna (often
alongside Sāmba/Śāmba), all invariably following the model established in the
sources we have examined here: Mahāsena’s Pradyumnacarita (Jaina 2006) was
composed in the tenth century, before Hemacandra’s day. Thereafter came
Siṃha’s twelfth-century Pajjuṇṇacariu (Jain, 2000), Somakīrti’s fifteenth-
century Pradyumnacarita (unpublished), Ravisāgaragaṇin’s sixteenth-
century Śāmbapradyumnacaritra (Esa 1987), Śubhacandra’s sixteenth-century
Pradyumnacarita (unpublished), Ratnacandra Gaṇin’s seventeenth-century
Pradyumnacaritramahākāvya (Śūrīśvara 1997), and Vācaka Kamalaśekhara’s
seventeenth-century Pradyumnakumāra Cupaī (Shah 1978). These are only a
few examples known to me of Jain kāvyas focusing on our hero. Pradyumna
has not been an obscure figure forgotten in the shadows of the Jain Harivaṃśa
and Mahābhārata tradition, and clearly a great deal more work remains to be
done before a comprehensive picture of the Jain Pradyumna, inclusive of the
kāvya and more recent renderings, can emerge. Unfortunately such a study is
not possible here, and for the moment I can only try to digest what is signifi-
cant in the sources examined in the preceding and how all of this speaks back
to the largely Brahminical constructions of Pradyumna’s character we have
seen and will see in remaining chapters.
In one sense, I have marked out a common space in which certain
features of both Brahminical and Jain Pradyumnas operate. HV 99 and the
Pradyumnacarita equally set up the boy as a male hero who exemplifies a
proper response to the feminine. Brahmin and Jain poets alike seem to be
of one mind, at least on this point: women are deceivers and in their modes
as sexualized beings are aggressive and dangerous to masculine indepen-
dence. A total control must therefore be exerted over them and the powers
they embody. Pradyumna models this total control. But herein lies the partic-
ular Brahminical and Jain declensions of the virtue, articulated through their
handlings of the Pradyumna drama: control means, in the Brahminical con-
text, total sexual appropriation, entailing a triumphal declaration of virility and
masculine power and emasculation of the rival enemy male, from whom the
woman and her powers are taken. Or, for the Jains: total control means total
resistance to the feminine and all that she represents, and the retention of an
unshakeable celibacy and resistance to kāma, which brings about masculine
husbandry of feminine Vidyā powers.
If the Jain sources subvert the meaning and significance of Pradyumna
for the Brahminical tradition, this can only sharpen, as all good foils do, our
understanding of that Brahminical understanding. I have argued particu-
larly in Chapter 3 that HV 99 encodes a complex set of social, sexual, and

138 | Pradyumna
religious values in which we see communicated a preoccupation with the fra-
gility of children and the valorization of masculine power, expressed through
the marriage of sex and violence. Operative therein, I have argued, are a set
of psychosexual anxieties concerning mothers, fathers, and sons, which are
resolved head-on in the demonic realm of the Māyāvatī-Pradyumna-Śambara
triangle, making of Kṛṣṇa’s son a very particular kind of vaṃśa-vīra and ideal
male. Pradyumna in HV 99 has his psychosexual cake and eats it too. That
the Jain authors read all of this in this way and understood the Brahminical
Pradyumna to embody just such a particular set of virtues is demonstrated
by their direct reversal of them. Puṣpadanta, Jinasena, and our other three
authors knew perfectly well how and why the Brahminical tradition celebrated
Pradyumna as a heroic character, just as they understood how and why Kṛṣṇa
and Rāma were worshipped as divinities—and they took exception. To return
to the words of Jaini from the opening of the present chapter, they sought to
set the record straight.
Pradyumna was, after all, heroic and worthy of emulation, but not because
he yielded to a perverse invitation to incestuous union, and not because he slew
his foster-father. The Jain Pradyumna, now Kāma himself—and so the last
man on earth liable to succumb to passion—rejects the psychosexual cake and
eats not a crumb of it, just as the larger Jain tradition rejects the Brahminical
valorization of desire, male sexual power, and violence, as well as the obses-
sion with male lines of descent that drive them. Earlier I have stressed, and in
the following will continue to stress even more directly, the pairing of sex and
violence, following Dhand’s observations on how the pravṛtti-nivṛtti typology
ties them intimately together (Dhand 2008, 45–53). Jains as well tie them to-
gether time and again in their cautionary tales,39 pointing of course in the
opposite direction. There is in the Pradyumnacarita no triumphant sex-and-
violence resolution of the epic-Oedipal conflict. Rather, the boy turns his back
on the perverse sexualized feminine mother figure and defuses the tension
once and for all, making a joke of it in the end as he mock-abducts the wholly
and truly maternal Rukmiṇī and fights briefly and harmlessly with Kṛṣṇa.
To be sure, Pradyumna was destined to suffer abduction and the shocking
scandal of the Kanakamālā episode because of his misdeeds as Madhu. But
his stock of merit, expiatory asceticism, and judicious recourse to enlightened
male authority steer him clear onto the path of emancipation. He consequently
enjoys a blessed existence, empowered by his Vidyā companion, and becomes
a true Vidyādhara through his underground lābhasthāna victories, which turn
the tables on his brothers’ aggression. The Jain Pradyumna, like the sea-going
Pradyumna of the Brahminical Purāṇas and like the biblical Joseph, had the
special knack of turning threat to opportunity.
The kinds of reversals we see in the narrative reflect a deeper concern on
the part of the Jain authors to respond to and reconfigure the social, sexual,
and religious values that shaped HV 99 and its Purāṇic variations. This is,
on the one hand, illuminating for us and vital to the larger task of defining

the jAin pr AdyumnACAritA | 139

the contours of Pradyumna in South Asian myth and literature. But perhaps
it is clearer now, through the contrasting figure of the Jain Pradyumna, just
what the Brahminical values were that informed the composition of HV 99
and which spoke to those who read and listened to the unusual deeds of
Kṛṣṇa’s son.40

140 | Pradyumna
moment that Śiva and Pārvatī are married, or immediately before. Pārvatī occasion-
ally is the one to resuscitate him (see Doniger 1981 [1973], 155–158; she cites ŚivP
2.3.27.18–19 and 60–61, 2.2.16.30–31, and SkP 1.1.22.19–20 for this motif), or alter-
nately it may be Śiva (e.g., Skanda Purāṇa 5.3.150.30).

Chapter 5

1. On the interaction between the Hindu narratives and their Jain renderings, see
Vaishakhiya 1946; Jha 1969; Chatterjee 1973, 1973–1974; Cort 1993; Jaini 1993; Bauer
2005; Geen 2009, 2011; Couture and Chojnacki 2014; Appleton 2016.
2. This arrangement is especially baffling for those familiar with the Brahminical
myths: in the eighth triad, Lakṣmaṇa is the “Vāsudeva” and Rāma the “Baladeva.” The
Jain pattern thus does not replicate the Vaiṣṇava avatāra pattern, which we might ex-
pect would place both Rāma and Kṛṣṇa as Vāsudevas. Only Kṛṣṇa is a Vāsudeva, and
as such the triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣa system seems rather to follow the pattern established
by the name Rāma, identifying Dāśaratha Rāma and Kṛṣṇa’s brother Rāma as having
been the eighth and ninth Baladevas, respectively.
3. Alsdorf speculates that there may have been as many as twenty-seven Jain
Harivaṃśas (Alsdorf 1936a, 13 note 7), and one catalogue of Jain manuscripts
enumerates more than fifty works named either Harivaṃśapurāṇa, Nemicarita, or
Pāṇḍavacarita (De Clercq 2009, 400 and note 5).
4. A fundamental premise in Jaini’s thinking, and problematic in my view, is that
Kṛṣṇa was first a famed human hero with a story cycle known and shared by South
Asians of various religious orientations, and later was divinized into an avatāra of
Viṣṇu, at which point the Jains began to articulate their own versions of Kṛṣṇa’s life
(Jaini 1993, 208–209). There are, however, no extant sources suggesting that Kṛṣṇa
was ever simply a human hero. It is true that the classic daśāvatāra system emerges
only after the epics, but the earliest evidence we have already casts Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa as
a deity, whether we are speaking of the Besnagar pillar or the critical text of the MBh.
5. While clearly framed within the larger life of Kṛṣṇa, Alsdorf identifies the
Pradyumnacarita as an independent narrative unit that can be treated on its own
(1936a, 12). De Clercq, however, identifies only four major preoccupations of
these Jain sources, namely (1) Harivaṃśa, (2) Pāṇḍavacarita, (3) Nemicarita, and
(4) Vasudevahiṇḍī, or amorous adventures of Vasudeva (2009, 418). The later pro-
liferation of Jain Pradyumna kāvyas (see later discussion), however, demonstrates
the currency and independence of the Pradyumna tale in Jain tradition, and strongly
suggests that Alsdorf was correct to identify the Pradyumnacarita as a self-standing
unit alongside these four other Jain epic concerns.
6. Two other Jain sources worthy of mention here are the fifth-century Ce
Antagaḍadasāo, a canonical work of the Śvetāmbaras, which relates very little in nar-
rative form concerning Pradyumna (Pajjuṇṇa), but does confirm at an early date all
the same basic biographical details established in the Brahminical sources regarding
his place in the Kṛṣṇa’s family. It also states that, along with several other of his
relatives, he became a monk at the end of his life, taking ordination under Nemi.
More substantial, and certainly worthy of closer study, were there sufficient time
and space, would be the ninth- or tenth-century Ce Apabhraṃśa Riṭṭhaṇemicariu of
Svayambhūdeva, which tells the Pradyumna narrative in Book 1, saṃdhis 10–13.

260 | Notes
 7. Vas is a work in archaic Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī from before the sixth century Ce
(Alsdorf 1936b; 1936a, 35). It is possibly as early as second century Ce (Jain 1977,
27). Warder places it at roughly 500 Ce (1977, 174). Vas is not a work following
the large “Triṣaṣṭi” model, but is rather a rendering of the now lost Bṛhatkathā of
Guṇāḍhya. The principal section of Saṅghadāsa Gaṇin’s text is structured around
the wanderings (hiṇḍi) and especially amorous conquests of Kṛṣṇa’s father Vasudeva,
who corresponds to the figure of Prince Naravāhanadatta in the Bṛhatkathāślokasa
ṅgraha. The principal section or ahigāra of the Vas is preceded by four others and
followed by a concluding one, yielding six parts: (1) kahupatti, (2) peḍhiyā, (3) muha,
(4) paḍimuha, (5) sarīra, and (6) uvasaṃhāra ahigāras. In the second, third, and
fourth sections, the storytelling frame for Vasudeva’s wanderings is established, and
this involves Pradyumna and his half-brother Sāmba directly as interlocutors and
prompters of Vasudeva’s tale. It is in these run-up chapters to the sarīra, particularly
the second and third ahigāras, that the Vas delivers its Pradyumnacarita. Overall,
then, the Vas represents a different tradition of Jain storytelling than that of the
Sixty-three Illustrious Men cycle, although sharing with them the same fundamental
Pradyumnacarita narrative. As there exists no critically edited and complete text of
the Vas, I here lean on the studies of Alsdorf (1936a, 34–40) and Jagdishchandra
Jain (1977), which are based on a 1930–1931 publication of an incomplete Vas (Muni
Caturavijaya and Muni Puṇyavijaya, eds., Bhāvanagara: Śrījaina Ātmānandasabha)
based on twelve manuscripts. Both Jain (1977, 10, 17–28) and Alsdorf (1936a, 35 note
4; 1936b, 320 note 1) remark upon the roughness and difficulties encountered in this
edition. I have followed Alsdorf’s summary (1936a, 34–40) and Jain’s English trans-
lation (1977, esp. 159–186 and 630–657), as well as their custom of referring to the
Caturavijaya-Puṇyavijaya edition of the Vas by page and line number.
8. This is a Sanskrit work of the Digambara monk Ācārya Punnāṭa Jinasena,
completed in Gujarat in 783 Ce (Cort 1993, 191). Ji is a substantial Sanskrit work of
66 sargas, composed almost entirely in śloka, and while it is largely concerned with
the life and lineage of Kṛṣṇa, it begins with basic issues of cosmology and the de-
scription of the Jain universe (1–7), Ṛṣabha and other figures in the period of the
first twenty-one Tīṛthaṅkaras leading up to Kṛṣṇa’s father Vasudeva (8–18), a mini-
Vasudevahiṇḍī encapsulating the earlier Vas with its focus on Vasudeva’s acquisition
of wives (19–32), the birth and early life of Kṛṣṇa, Baladeva, and Nemi (33–39), and
finally Kṛṣṇa’s adult biography, including his death and subsequent fate (40–66).
It is here that we find woven in the Pradyumnacarita at sargas 43 and 47–48, with
chapters 44–46 interrupting Pradyumna’s tale with those of his half-brother Bhānu
and of the Pāṇḍavas.
9. Gu, Pu, and Hm are all “Triṣaṣṭi” genre works covering the whole cycle of
Sixty-three Illustrious Men. Gu is the conclusion of a larger work commenced by
the ninth-century poet Jinasena of Karnataka—not to be confused with our Gujarati
Ācārya Punnāṭa Jinasena, the author of Ji. This Jinasena of Karnataka had composed
in Sanskrit the first forty-two books of a work entitled Triṣaṣṭilakṣaṇamahāpurāṇa,
treating therein the first Tīrthaṅkara Ṛṣabha and first Cakravartin Bharata. Books
43–77 of this work, treating all the remaining Sixty-one Illustrious Men, were
completed by Jinasena’s student Guṇabhadra. These total seventy-seven chapters
of the Triṣaṣṭilakṣaṇamahāpurāṇa are divided into an Ādipurāṇa (chap. 1–47) and

Notes | 261
Uttarapurāṇa (chap. 48–77), with Guṇabhadra completing, in 897 Ce (Jain 1977, 3),
the final five chapters of the Ādi, and the entirety of the Uttara. We may therefore
speak of the Uttarapurāṇa of Guṇabhadra as an independent work (indeed, it has
been published as such by Pannalal Jain, 2007) which, in chapters 70–72, offers a
Harivaṃśapurāṇa treating Nemi, Kṛṣṇa, and related figures in some 1,200 verses or
so. Its Pradyumnacarita occurs at 72.1–177.
10. Pu is an Apabhraṃśawork completed in 965 Ce (Alsdorf 1936a, 2–5) in
the latter years of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa dynasty. Pu’s 102 chapters are also broken into an
Ādipurāṇa (1–37) and Uttarapurāṇa (38–102), and particularly chapters 81–92 may
be isolated as Puṣpadanta’s “Harivaṃśapurāṇa.” This covers the origins of Kṛṣṇa’s
lineage and past lives of Nemi (81–82), an integrated Vasudevahiṇḍī, as in Ji, of
Vasudeva’s amorous conquests (83), early life of Kṛṣṇa (84–86), Kṛṣṇa’s war with his
Prativāsudeva, Jarāsandha, as well as early life and renunciation of Nemi (87–89),
fore-births of Kṛṣṇa’s eight chief wives (90), and finally the Pradyumnacarita (91),
which concludes in 92 along with narratives of the last days of the Yādavas, Pāṇḍavas,
and final liberation of Nemi. It is these twelve chapters (81–92) that Alsdorf presents
in Roman text, German translation, and with very substantial preliminary treatment
of the author, his text, its precedents, and analysis of available manuscripts in Alsdorf
1936a, all of which has been extremely important for the present analysis of the Jain
Pradyumna.
11. Certainly the best-known Jain Triṣaṣṭi text, Hm is a Sanskrit work composed
around 1160–1170 Ce (Alsdorf 1936a, 29). Hm follows the common practice of dividing
the Jain universal history into an Ādipurāṇa and Uttarapurāṇa section. It is most
readily available through the English translation of Helen M. Johnson, published
by Gaekwad’s Oriental Series (Johnson 1962), which I have consulted alongside a
2006 reprint of the 1936 Ahmedabad Kalikālasarvajña edition. Hm delivers its
Pradyumnacarita after dealing with Kṛṣṇa’s young life up to the slaying of Kaṃsa
(8.5), young life of Nemi and Kṛṣṇa’s acquisition of wives (8.6.1–109). Just like Ji,
Hm’s Pradyumnacarita, beginning at 8.6.110, is interrupted with stories about the
Pāṇḍavas (8.6.264–378), and subsequently resumed.
12. Any one of these five texts may share points of fine detail with any other of
the other four sources, thus frustrating any obvious pattern of borrowing. We can say,
however, that Hm seems to draw substantially from Ji, and that Gu and Pu stand in
very close relationship, so much so that Alsdorf all but equates them. “In Auswahl,
Anordnung und Behandlung des Stoffes stimmen Pupṣpadanta und Guṇabhadra so
genau überein und unterscheiden sich so stark von allen andern Fassungen, daß sie
für Zwecke dieser Untersuchung im allgemeinen als identisch betrachtet und daher
im folgended als die Version GU/P bezeichnet werden können” (Alsdorf 1936a, 14).
Alsdorf proposes not a simple dependence of Puṣpadanta upon Guṇabhadra, but of
both upon a third, now lost source (1936a, 14). De Clercq also says of Guṇabhadra’s
Uttarapurāṇa that it “is sometimes very brief and rather obscure, suggesting that
Guṇabhadra used and adapted unknown earlier sources” (2009, 405). Finally, it is
also fair to say that, perhaps with the exception of Vas, one finds in all of these sources
passages so brief and cryptic that one can only assume the poet is referring obliquely
to a detail recorded more substantially in another source. Indeed, it is at times only
by reading one rendering of the narrative that another becomes intelligible. Finally,

262 | Notes
we should note that we are here reading Digambara texts (Ji, Gu, and Pu) alongside
Śvetāmbara (Hm) as though they represented the same community. Of course they
do not, but it lies beyond the scope of this study to nuance further the denomina-
tional differences within the Jain tradition. See De Clercq 2009, 417, on structural
differences between Śvetāmbara and Digambara renderings of Kṛṣṇa’s life and the
Mahābhārata; for a summary of how Śvetāmbara and Digambara texts recast the
Kṛṣṇa narrative tradition more broadly, see Couture and Chojnacki 2014, 165–192.
13. Vas 82.8–83.15; Ji 43.1–38; Gu 72.157–159 and 72.46; Pu 91.6; Hm 8.6.110–129.
14. Vas 83.16–25; Ji 43.39–61; Gu 72.46–61; Pu 91.7–9; Hm 8.6.126–138.
15. Vas 83.26–91.27, 85.5–91.24; Ji 43.62–223; Gu 72.62–71, 1–45; Pu 91.9–10,
91.1–6; Hm 8.6.139–263.
16. Vas 91.28–92.23; Ji 47.48–68; Gu 72.76–101; Pu 91.10–13; Hm 8.6.379–398.
17. Vas 92.24–93.11; Ji 47.28–47; 47.69–82; Gu 72.102–133; Pu 91.13–19; Hm
8.6.398–404.
18. Vas 93.12–97.4; Ji 47.83–137; Gu 72.134–169; Pu 19–22; Hm 8.6.409–493.
19. Vas 97.5–98.10; Ji 48.1–9; Gu 72.170–177; Pu 92.4–5; Hm 8.7.1–37.
20. The near-simultaneous birth of the two boys is in fact already established
in the critical HV, where Sāmba is said to be born in the month of Pradyumna’s ab-
duction: hṛto yadaiva pradyumnaḥ śambareṇātmaghātinā | tam eva māsaṃ sāmbas tu
jāmbavatyām ajāyata || HV 100.1.
21. In Ji 43.40, Gu 72.48–49, and Pu 91.7, Dhūmaketu is alerted to the boy’s
presence when his sky-going chariot is stopped dead in its aerial tracks. This is a
motif we shall see elsewhere: special people on earth seem to create “no-fly-zones” for
sky-goers.
22. Curiously, this rock (śilā) is styled “Takṣa” or “Takṣaka” (Ji 43.48; Gu 72.53;
Pu 91.7), thus seeming to invoke the famed Gāndhāran city, although why the poets
might wish to do this I cannot say.
23. Here again we have the “no-fly-zone” motif: in Vas it is said that because
Pradyumna is in his final existence and is destined to be liberated in the pre-
sent lifetime, Kālasaṃvara’s chariot cannot pass over him; in Hm, Kālasaṃvara
understands that the interruption of his flight is because a great person is impeding
it (vimānaskhalane hetur mahātmā ko’py asāu, Hm 8.6.136).
24. In Vas 83, Pradyumna wears bound upon him a ring identifying him as the
son of Vāsudeva.
25. In Ji and Hm, this wisdom is demonstrated by the recounting of yet another
past-life narrative: the Jain master proves, in front of the large assembly, that the two
brahmin brothers had been avaricious jackals in their prior existence (Ji 43.115–136;
Hm 8.6.163–172). A witness who can recall his past existence functions as the truth-
teller; the brothers are humiliated. In Gu and Pu, the sage commands his monks to
remain silent in the face of these animal-slaughtering aggressors, who are shown up
by the Jains’ superior virtue and self-control (Gu 72.6–9; Pu 91.1–2).
26. In Ji and Hm, the parents simply do not convert (Ji 43.147; Hm 8.6.177), while
in Gu and Pu, they falsely make a display of conversion in order to appease the Yakṣa,
but do not then practice the Dharma properly (Gu 72.21; Pu 91.3).
27. For reasons that are beyond me, these names directly invoke a Vaiṣṇava myth
in which Viṣṇu slays the demons Madhu and Kaiṭabha.

Notes | 263
 28. In Hm (8.6.229–238), Nārada also learns about the karmic backstory of
Rukmiṇī. It covers several stages of existence and karmic retribution, but the prime
determining factor of her karmic lot as Rukmiṇī came about in an existence as a
woman named Lakṣmīvatī. Lakṣmīvatī had accidentally smeared a peacock’s egg with
kuṅkuma, resulting in the mother’s abandonment of the unrecognized egg for several
hours—sixteen ghāṭikas, to be precise. Moreover, Lakṣmīvatī then takes possession
of the young peacock once the mother returns to sit upon and hatch the rain-washed
egg. Once the bird is sixteen months old, she takes pity on the still-grieving mother
and returns the bird to her. Of course, this sets upon her the fate of having to suffer
the loss of her son for sixteen years.
29. Kṛṣṇa’s encounter with the perfume-toting kubjikā or hunch-backed woman
(HV 71.22–35) is assigned to his father Vasudeva in Jain retellings of Kṛṣṇa’s life (e.g.,
Hm 8.2.124–128; Couture and Chojnacki 2014, 217), although he does not heal her.
30. Jain articulations of women and women’s natures are of course widely varied
and by no means are wholly misogynistic or arise solely in the ascetic context. See
Sethi 2010 for a balanced review of the topic, including but not limited to the Jain
pattern of “masculinizing renunciation” (2010, 49–51).
31. For a succinct explanation of this important point see Geen 2011, 79–81.
32. Kālaśaṃvara does not even believe her claim in Vas, and he reacts violently
only to Pradyumna’s killing of his other sons (Vas 92).
33. One of the most ingeniously engineered such tale is the episode of
Kuberadatta and Kuberadattā (Granoff 1995, 415–417), which concludes with the nun
Kuberadattā’s explanation to a boy of his relation to her: he is her brother-in-law,
brother, son, grandson, uncle, and nephew, while other characters involved equally
can be said to occupy almost every family position at once due to the sickening in-
cest rooted in ignorance and lust. See also the story of Mohadattā (Granoff 2006,
152–168), which similarly reverse-engineers a horrific nuclear family drama of incest,
lust, and violence, all born from ignorance (moha-datta).
34. See also Shah 1947 and Tiwari 1974.
35. I will, however, observe, as a point perhaps for further research, that the
lābhasthāna episode—in which the boy, empowered by his accompanying goddess,
wins a number of magical items from various supernatural forces in remote caves
and corners of the countryside—also strikes me as having something of a tantric
coloring to it. Alsdorf sees the lābhasthāna episode as “eine Ausschmückung der Pr.-
Geschichte mit volkstümlichen Märchenmotiven darstellt,” (1936a, 114) but points
out as well that another Jain story, Nāgakumāracarita, has a similar tale, with its hero
likewise progressing going through various environments and acquiring magic items
(1936a, 114). All of this is suggestive of what is known as a nidhi siddhi, described by
Davidson in the following way (from an eighth-century text entitled Subāhuparipṛcchā
Tantra): “Treasure [nidhi] siddhi is the ability to find treasures in the earth. The two
kinds of treasure are human and divine. Human treasure is simply caches of gold,
silver or gems. Divine treasure includes pills, malachite, magic boots, and books;
these will allow one to fly into the sky, become invisible, run swiftly, and immediately
penetrate the content of any text” (Davidson 2002, 200).
36. Writing not of the Jain Pradyumnacarita but the Vulgate HV, Ruben (1944,
163–164) identifies in the Māyāvatī-Pradyumna-Śambara triangle echoes of the

264 | Notes
Oedipus, Joseph, Phaedra, and other myths, and comes by a short route of somewhat
haphazard associations to the Kunāla legend of the Aśokāvadāna discussed earlier.
37. See, for example, Granoff 1998, 169–172, for another Sanatkumāra tale—in
this case he is already the Cakravartin emperor and is said to be the most hand-
some male alive. In the previously mentioned scheme of twenty-four Kāmadevas,
Sanatkumāra is the seventh, even while he is the fourth Cakravartin.
38. See also Bollée 1970.
39. In his preamble to a translation of the Jain story of Yaśodhara, Hardy
writes: “The overt intention of the story is to demonstrate the consequences of hiṃsā,
a sacrificial killing of living beings for the sake of some personal benefit. The price
that will have to be paid for this turns the culprit into a victim of similar acts of
hiṃsā. . . . But behind this can also be detected another intention: to reveal the in-
trinsic connection of hiṃśā with kāma, of violence with sexual passion. Thus it is not
an accident that Yaśodhara is motivated to commit his act of hiṃsā after a traumatic
erotic experience; that time and again in his subsequent lives sex and violence go
hand in hand; and that . . . his final purification is brought about by the desire for
sexual prowess of another king” (Hardy 1990, 118).
40. Material from this chapter was presented at the Conference on the Study of
Religions of India (CSRI), Drew University, Madison, NJ, June 27–30, 2013.

Chapter 6

1. The countless late additions to the MBh generally do not exhibit much of a
concern with Pradyumna’s identity or narrative, nor indicate that those who received
and expanded the written MBh had much concern to weave his abduction narrative
back into the MBh. Surveying these * passages and appendices, we see Pradyumna
very frequently mentioned in passing, alongside other Vṛṣṇi heroes in lists of fighters
(MBh 1 App. 114 lines 9–11, 191; 2 App. 1 line 12, App. 21 lines 481, 987, 998, 1386, 1527;
4 App. 61 line 20; 7 App. 3 line 5, etc.), or occasionally referenced when Kṛṣṇa’s deeds
are related (such MBh * passages and appendices often betray close familiarity with
the critical edition HV material, e.g., MBh 2 *App. 21 line 1479). Occasionally as well,
Pāñcarātra passages make their way into the text, and these may place Pradyumna
in the usual emanation sequences (e.g., MBh 14 App. 4 line 1663). The tapasic con-
ception of Pradyumna, already established in the critical MBh text, also reappears in
a late addition (MBh 13 *App. 16, esp. lines 160–165). In any case, the custodians and
developers of the Sanskrit MBh clearly did not see the epic as the venue for expanding
upon the character and narrative of Kṛṣṇa’s son—the HV was rather the proper place
for this work.
2. bahūn samāhṛtya vibhinnadeśyān kośān viniścitya ca pāṭham agryam | Vulgate
MBh Ādiparvan introduction 6 (Kinjawadekar 1936).
3. An arbitrary criterion of size (approximately 25 lines or so) is the only thing
distinguishing * passages and appendices: Vaidya’s shortest appendix is 23 lines
(App. I 28), while the longest * passages are rarely more than 20 lines.
4. We also find a number of minor episodes where the post-critical edition
poets have brought Pradyumna into their embellishments of the text. I will not detail
all such small additions involving minor references to Pradyumna. Two, however,
bear mentioning. The first is App. I 24, the “Āhnika” prayer uttered by Balarāma.

Notes | 265