Nalini Balbir


Nalini Balbir is a French Indologist who lives in Paris. She is a scholar of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. She was a direct student of Indologist Colette Caillat. She is known for her work on the publication of the Catalogue of the Jain Manuscripts of the British Library published by the Institute of Jainology.

Biography

Nalini Balbir was born of a French mother and an Indian father. She started her career as a teacher of French, Latin and Greek in secondary schools, before completing her PhD in Indian Studies with the edition and annotated translation of the Danastaka-katha, a book of Jain narratives in Sanskrit, which was published in 1982. Between 1982-1988 she was a Research scholar in the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, where she completed her DLitt in Indian Studies with a magisterial work on the complex Jaina Avasyaka literature which was published in 1993 under the title Avasyaka Studien. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to classical and modern Indian philology she became Professor of Indian Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 1988. Dr Balbir is currently Professor for Indian Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and since the year 2000 also Directeur d'Études for Middle-Indian Philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. As a trained philologist, her main areas of research are Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Theravada Buddhism, Jainism, and Hindi language and literature of the 20th century. She is also a member of Pali text society in London and editor since 1983 of Bulletin d'Études Indiennes, an Indology Journal.

Publications