John D. Smith was born in Nottingham in 1946. He attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read Sanskrit and Hindi. In the early 1970s he held a research fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge; this was followed by nine years as a lecturer in Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. In 1984 he returned to Cambridge, where he was an emeritus reader in Sanskrit. He has worked on both Sanskrit and modern Rajasthani, and his publications include The Vīsaḷadevarāsa: A Restoration of the Text and The Epic of Pābūjī: A Study, Transcription and Translation.
