Prabandha

Prabandha is a medieval Sanskrit literary genre of semi-historical anecdotal narratives about the lives of notable figures, written in colloquial rather than classical Sanskrit and drawing on folklore and vernacular expression. It was cultivated primarily by Jain scholars in western India, especially the Gujarat and Malwa regions, from the thirteenth century onward; the earliest explicitly titled collection is Jinabhadra's Prabandhavali of 1234, and later collections such as the 1464 Panchashati-Prabandha-Sambandha gathered hundreds of individual prabandhas. A related Telugu prabandha tradition also developed as its own genre.