The contributors

Nalini Balbir, Doctor in Indian Studies, is Professor of Indology at the Université Paris-3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle and Director of Studies (Middle-Indian Philology) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques. Her research focuses on the history, development and present of Jainism, and on Pali Buddhism. She is currently a member of the Equipe d'Accueil EA 2120, “Groupe de Recherches en Etudes Indiennes” (GREI), on whose website you will find a list of her work.

Fabien Chartier teaches at the University of Rennes. He obtained his doctorate in 2004 with a thesis on "The Reception of Rabindranath Tagore in Great Britain and France". After teaching French at Delhi University, Saint Stephen's College, and Liverpool University, he turned to teaching English. He has edited several works on India, notably the Quarto-Gallimard  dedicated to Tagore, published in 2020. In India and France, he regularly gives lectures on Tagore. 

Jean Michel Delire holds a degree in mathematical sciences from the University of Brussels (ULB) and a doctorate in philosophy and letters from the same university, with a thesis on the oldest Sanskrit texts with a mathematical content. For the past ten years, he has focused his research on the mathematical and astronomical works of Raja Savai Jai Singh II (1689-1743) of Jaipur, a city in India (Rajasthan) where J.M.Delire frequently resides, as well as on the contributions of Jesuit missionaries to knowledge of Indian science during the same period. He currently teaches a History of Mathematics course and a Science et civilisation de l'Inde - Textes sanskrits course at ULB's Institut des Hautes Etudes de Belgique. He has edited Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient India (2012) and Art et savoir de l'Inde (2015), proceedings of the exhibition and lecture series he organized in 2013-2014 on the occasion of Europalia-India. He is also the author of Mathématiques multiculturelles I (2018) and numerous articles. He is currently preparing a book on mathematics and its history, to be published by Ellipses.

Juliette Denis-Migault is a contract doctoral student in the Textes et Documents de la Méditerranée Antique et Médiévale laboratory at the University of Aix-Marseille. Her thesis entitled “Mallarmé, poète sanskrit?” deals with syntactic and poetic convergences between Mallarmé and classical Indian poetry, whose corpus is based on Le Portrait enchanté, an extract from Stéphane Mallarmé's Contes indiens and the original Sanskrit extract from Daṇḍin's Daśakumāracarita. It is directed by Sylvain Brocquet, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and Civilization at the University of Aix-Marseille, and Jean-Nicolas Illouz, Professor of 19th-century French Literature at the University of Paris VIII. Juliette Denis-Migault holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a Master's degree in Comparative Philosophies: Indian Philosophies, obtained in 2012 at Université Paris IV under the supervision of François Chenet.

Guillaume Ducoeur is Professor of Comparative History of Religions at the Institut d'Histoire des Religions, Faculty of Historical Sciences, University of Strasbourg, and a member of UMR 7044 - Archimède. His teaching and research focus on the history of Vedic and ancient Indian religions from a comparative perspective, historical contacts between the Greek and Indian worlds, the historiography of the discipline of Indianism and, more broadly, the comparative history of religions. He also teaches Sanskrit, Pali and Indian epigraphy.

Aditi Gupta is a PhD candidate in French Studies at the University of Oxford. Her forthcoming thesis will shine a light on the life and work of Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), a French East India Company officer who spent twenty-five years in different parts of India, where he constituted his collection of manuscripts, art albums, maps, and material culture from the subcontinent.  This project is fully funded by the AHRC Oxford-Open-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership and the Clarendon Fund. 
Prior to beginning doctoral study at Oxford, she obtained a BA in French Language and Civilisation and an MA in French Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include travel writing, history of collections, history of the book, and material culture.

Claudine Le Blanc, professor of comparative literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, is a former student of the École normale supérieure, Paris, and holds an agrégation  in modern literature. Her work focuses on the literature of classical and modern India and its circulation, epic oral traditions and the notion of literary modernity.  She has published "Une littérature en archipel. La tradition orale de La Bataille de Piriyapattana au Karnataka, Inde du sud" (Champion, 2005), "Histoire de la littérature de l'Inde moderne. Le roman, XIXe-XXe siècles" (Ellipses, 2006), and "Les livres de l’Inde. Une littérature étrangère en France au XIXe siècle" (PSN, 2014). 
She has also co-edited "L’usage des héros. Traditions narratives et affirmations identitaires dans le monde indien (with V. Bouillier, Champion, 2006), L'ailleurs de l'autre. Récits de voyageurs extra-européens (with J. Weber, PUR, 2009), L'Inde de leurs textes. Littératures d'Asie du Sud en diaspora, DESI n° 4, with N. Dejenne, 2109) and since 2014 has been coordinating the Idex-USPC Dictionnaire des littératures de l'Inde (DELI) project with Anne Castaing and Nicolas Dejenne. 

Charles Li received a doctorate in Sanskrit from the University of Cambridge, where he completed a critical edition and translation of Bhartṛhari's Dravyasamuddeśa, a 5^th-century text on the philosophy of language, along with the 10^th-century commentary by Helārāja. He was a research fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and then at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, where he worked on the Texts Surrounding Texts project in association with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). He is currently a specialist in computational philology at the Tamilex project of the Universität Hamburg.

Ronan Moreau is a lecturer in Indian Studies and head of the Indian and Central Asian Studies Library at the Collège de France. His research focuses partly on classical Sanskrit literature (Vedas, epics, etc.), particularly through the study of animal and nature representations. Additionally, he works on the historiography of Indian studies, particularly on Sylvain Lévi and his travels in Asia.

Jérôme Petit is the curator in charge of the South and Southeast Asia manuscript collection at the National Library of France. He serves as the scientific head of the France-South Asia Shared Heritage Project. Additionally, he is a professor of Languages and Manuscript Cultures of the Indian World at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), within the historical and philological sciences section, and is a member of the research group in Indian studies (GREI).

Dr. Abha Singh is a retired professor of Medieval Indian History at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi, India. Her principal areas of research are 'Suba of Delhi under the Mughals, 1580-1719' and 'Religion, Identity, and Social Protests: Satnamis of Narnaul.' She is presently working on a monograph based on the Du Jardin Papers. She is a recipient of Commonwealth and Charles Wallace Fellowships. Her studies are largely based on Persian, Rajasthani, and Braj sources. She has presented and published as many as 20 papers in international and national conferences. As a former faculty member at IGNOU, she has published books on the history of the Indian economy and urbanization in India as part of the Master's in History program.