Research Area 1

The documents represent a completely new and so far unknown genre of Indian literature which can be best compared with certain examples of so-called letter writers that comprise models for public and administrative documents. As these letter writers, the new documents promise important information on social, economic, and cultural conditions that are otherwise rather rare. In the case of the JZC, this information is especially welcome, since it concerns a time and a region that is extremely underrepresented in historiography but played a pivotal role in important transformation processes that accompanied the arrival of Islam in North-West India. A PhD project will be devoted to the study of the administrative, legal, and commercial terminology attested in the JZC. This study will be done against the background of epigraphical and literary evidence, especially in the genre of medieval letter writers, such as the Lokaprakāśa attributed to Kṣemendra. Among all works of this genre, the Lokaprakāśa is historically and geographically most closely related to the JZC and deserves therefore special attention. It is therefore necessary to ground the work on the administrative and legal terminology of the Lokaprakāśa on a revised edition and study of this text, with a focus on chapters 1 and 2 that are devoted to lexicography and epistemology. The PhD thesis on the administrative, commercial, and legal terminology of pre-modern Kashmir and Punjab will be carried out by Conforti.