Banarasidas ARDHAKATHANAK (A Half Story) Read online

  The first autobiography in an Indian language

  Poet, philosopher and merchant, Banarasidas had no precedent in literature or tradition that might have inspired him to write his life’s story or guided him in his task. His motivation to write his story was simple: ‘Let me tell my story to all.’ Completed in the winter of 1641, in Agra, Ardhakathanak is the first autobiography in an Indian language.

  Banarasidas charms us with his transparency and frankness, revealing as much of himself as possible. And he punctuates the fast-flowing narrative of his life every now and then to muse on the nature of human existence. The result is an astonishing account that is more modern than medieval in tone, and free of formulaic conventions and stylized ornamentation.

  At the end of his ‘half story’, Banarasi becomes as intimate to us as an old friend. We know the ups and downs of his life almost as well as we know our own and we come to identify with his intellectual and spiritual struggles, and perhaps even share them.

  Rohini Chowdhury provides an elegant English translation in free verse. The book also includes a scholarly, insightful introduction by Rupert Snell.

  Translated from the Braj Bhasha by ROHINI CHOWDHURY

  Cover: Depiction of a market scene by Prosenjit Saha

  ARDHAKATHANAK

  Rohini Chowdhury writes for both children and adults. She has published several books for children including a novel and a short story collection. Her interests include translation, mathematics and history. She is currently working on a historical examination of pre-colonial India. Rohini lives in London with her husband and two daughters.

  ARDHAKATHANAK

  A Half Story

  BANARASIDAS

  Translated from the Braj Bhasha by

  ROHINI CHOWDHURY

  Preface by

  RUPERT SNELL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  This collection published 2009

  Copyright © Rohini Chowdhury 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-143-10054-6

  This digital edition published in 2016.

  e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75205-2

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Preface

  by Rupert Snell

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Ardhakathanak: A Half Story

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  PREFACE1

  Imagine sitting down to write the story of your life. Where would you begin, what incidents and experiences would you promote, which dark moments would you conceal, and how would you make your tale appealing to readers from times and places unknown? Such a task would challenge any writer, and most of us today would begin by scouting around to see how others had done it before—looking for a model to follow, an example to emulate. But imagine undertaking such a task if there was no model, when nobody had done it before (at least, in a language that you could read), and where all that lay before you was the blank page; how would you set about tracing the contours of your life with nothing but your memories as guides?

  These questions are meant to emphasize the novelty of Banarasidas’s chosen narrative mode of ‘autobiography’ in a literary tradition which rarely thought in terms of personal histories; but they are foolish questions, because they take no account of the differences in outlook between our lifetime and that of Banarasi nearly four centuries ago. He probably shared few of the motivations that might tempt a 21st-century author into autobiography: certainly, the ‘cult of the individual’ that features so prominently today would have seemed almost as exotic to Banarasi as our blithe expectation of a continuously smooth progress down the path of everyday life. Being, among many other things, a theologian with works of Jain metaphysics to his credit, Banarasi perhaps saw his own life story as nothing more or less than a convenient source of illustrations to help explain the meaning of human existence and to illustrate the interplay of suffering and contentment in the world. Though he has moments of proud introspection in which he lists his achievements as a scholar, or describes—with almost palpable relief—his return to the Jain fold after a period in a personal wilderness, his primary intention is not to promote himself, but rather to observe how a man must suffer the effects of his own past deeds, riding out storms in times of trouble and avoiding complacency in times of calm.

  Almost everyone who writes about Banarasi mentions his candour, for he was as quick to confess the mistakes and follies of his life as he was to boast of his accomplishments. Ever the businessman, he offers a neatly balanced tally of faults and merits at the end of his tale, leaving the reader satisfied that the account is settled and has been told with honesty and a certain objectivity of viewpoint. But a close reading of Banarasi’s poetry shows also that his many gifts included a certain slyness, a skill at leaving things implied between the lines. An example of his deliberate and knowing deployment of facts in the narrative is his account of his own birth.

  In Samvat 1643,

  In the bright half of the month of Magh,

  On the eleventh day, a Saturday

  When the Moon was in Taurus and the reigning nakshatra Rohini

  Was in the third quarter—in Kharagsen’s house a son was born.

  Such an account, especially when ripped from its context in the body of the poem, may at first seem unremarkable: after all, it is a commonplace of Indian dating systems that individual days be specified not only in terms of the annual (solar) calendar but also the monthly (lunar) one. Following this convention, therefore, Banarasi declares that he was born on the eleventh day of the bright half of the winter month of Magh, the phrase ‘bright half’ sita paksha indicating the fortnight when the moon was waxing, growing brighter. But the poet goes beyond the bare outline of these conventional dating data by adding further astrological information—a rare level of detail in literary calendars—and in so doing builds up a prolonged crescendo climaxing in the triumphant announcement ‘a son was born!’ Elsewhere in the Ardhakathanak, Banarasi describes many life-cycle events such as births and deaths: but nowhere else does he give us such an elaborate anticipation as this one celebrating his own appearance in the world. And he is not finished yet: in a further detail that may escape a hurried reading of the text, Banarasi locates the day of his birth in verse 84, cleverly alluding to one of the most sacred numbers in Indian numerology and thereby bringing a very special aura to the description of his ‘incarnation’ (avatara) on earth.

  There are many other such literary tricks up the poet’s sleeve. In another beautiful allusion that also goes unnoticed by the commentators, Banarasi’s uniquely appealing account-sheet of qualities and faults that concludes the text is a delightfully cunning use of the literary trope known as solah shringar—a listing of the ’sixteen adornments’ which conventionally describe the plural perfections of the idealized literary heroine. While the qualities of such a lady may be lovingly listed in references to a set of physical attributes (such as lotus-eyes, slender waist, broad hips) or abstract ones (sensitivity, musicality of voice, tenderness of ch
aracter), Banarasi distinguishes himself with a double list, detailing such qualities as his poetic and linguistic gifts on the positive side, and confessing to such vices as a love of clowning on the negative. The dark and light sides of his personality give us a wonderfully rounded sense of his own perceptions of self; and the knowingness with which he appropriates a well-known literary convention for this purpose is nothing less than delightful.

  How then does Banarasi compose his tale—how does he build on the various narrative genres that preceded it? In terms of metre, the Ardhakathanak looks back to a genre which Banarasi himself knew well, that of Sufi epics such as Madhumalati,2 written in Awadhi in CE 1545; Banarasi was an expert reciter of these Sufi allegories, as we know from verse 335 where he describes his habit of reciting Madhumalati and ‘Mirgavati’ (or Mrigavati) to groups of friends. Such texts were in turn a model for the much better-known Ramcharitmanas (or ‘Hindi Ramayan’) of Tulsidas, begun in 1574—just a dozen years before Banarasi’s birth—and this text, too, may have been familiar to him, though we cannot know for sure (and we do know that the Ramcharitmanas took some time to achieve its all-conquering popularity).

  These Awadhi poems were for the most part composed in two complementary metres. Most heavily used is the chaupai quatrain, which in Tulsi’s skilful hands became the perfect vehicle for prolonged recitation: the long couplet-rhymes, sometimes achieved by an artificial lengthening of the rhyme-syllable, bring a strident and dynamic motion to a recital of the poem. In terms of the prosodic weight of the line, a full quarter of the entire structure is taken up by the rhyme, as in the syllables –aagaa and –aaruu in the following example:

  3

  I revere the pollen-dust of the lotus feet of the guru—

  delicious, fragrant, sweet with love;

  a lovely powder imbued with the root of ambrosia

  that calms the entire retinue of worldly woes.

  Banarasi uses a variant on this metre:4 at fifteen rather than sixteen matras or ‘beats’ it is slightly shorter than Tulsi’s type; but more significant than this slight mathematical detail is the fact that its rhymes are milder and less insistent. The Ardhakathanak is not designed for a ritualized or programmed reading of the kind that has become such a central part of Tulsi’s tradition; both texts tell a story, but Banarasi’s is more matter-of-fact, and less rhetorically energized, than Tulsi’s devotional tour-de-force. Here is an example of a chaupai from the Ardhakathanak:

  I will tell my tale in the common speech of Madhyadesh.

  I will reveal that which is hidden

  And describe my past condition and character.

  Listen carefully, my friends.

  Both Tulsi and Banarasi use the chaupai in combination with the doha (or ‘dohra’) couplet. Though the doha has only two lines, each is divided by a fairly strong rhythmic pause or caesura (marked by a space in our text) just past the halfway point in the line; thus it has four ‘quarters’, and in this respect parallels the chaupai fairly closely. A four-line English translation works conveniently for both metres. Here is a doha:

  The man who believes that in times of joy he is happy,

  And that in times of sorrow he is sad,

  In the eyes of such an ignorant person

  Joy and Sorrow appear to be different from each other.

  Whereas Tulsi imposes a fairly regular structure on his text, usually alternating some eight lines in chaupai metre with a single doha, Banarasi uses a freer mixture of the two, interspersing short or long sequences in the one with short or long sequences in the other. Sometimes a change in metre seems to mark a change in narrative content; but this is far from being a regular feature, and there is no obvious reason (apart from aesthetics and sentence structure) why the poet should prefer one metre over the other for a particular segment of the text. Perhaps the short rhyming units of the chaupai may be preferred when the poet wants to scamper quickly through some narrative, without lingering to contemplate the events overmuch. Such circumstances are well matched by the chaupai’s punchy, staccato structure:

  On this second visit he stayed for a month.

  He stayed at home and did not step out even to the marketplace.

  Then he left Khairabad, this time with his wife,

  And a palanquin and a horse for the journey.

  One searches in vain—so far!—for a satisfying theory to explain when and why Banarasi switches from one metre to another, and these matters are largely overlooked by the agendas of traditional Hindi scholarship. But no such unclarity surrounds his use of other metric types: when seeking to showcase some particular idea or theme, Banarasi will typically use a lyric metre such as the savaiya (also called kavitt) such as the one in which he celebrates his friend Narottamdas in a fine accolade. In a long sequence of the text, beginning in verse 394, Banarasi writes about this acquaintance, which begins as a business partnership and ends up as a close friendship, a true meeting of minds. In verse 486 he sums up his admiration for this man in an acrostic—a verse in which the opening syllables of each line spell out the four syllables of the name ‘Narottam’. Modern editions of the Hindi text spoil the fun by announcing this feature in advance, giving 486 the title‘verse in praise of Narottamdas’(narottam-stuti); but greater pleasure comes if we encounter the verse innocently, finding its acrostic character revealed only when we reach the final line. By happy coincidence, the four syllables na-ro-tta-m(a) in the Devanagari script of the original yield eight individual letters in roman transliteration, allowing the translator a full octet of lines in which to capture the acrostic pattern in English:5

  Navpad meditation, and praise of God, occupies this wise and learned man;

  Acknowledge him a man of steadfast knowledge.

  Religion occupies all eight watches of his day.

  Of immense beauty, comeliness and wealth reside in him; praise him as the very image of the god of love. No

  Trace of conceit is there in him. Seven fields did he give away in charity.

  To the whole world, spread his fame.

  A man glorious and great, beloved as life to Banarasi—

  Make up his name using the first letter of each line.

  As in so many passages of the tale, the reader is left admiring Banarasi for his poetic wit, and celebrating with him the value of the friendships that he describes with eloquence and warmth. His praise of Narottam not only reveals the dutiful piety and noble qualities of his friend, but also shows the depth of the friendship itself: like no other poet of his time, Banarasi is happy to wear his heart on his sleeve.

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text is its astonishing ability to collapse the centuries, and to make 17th-century experiences seem not merely vivid but also entirely understandable to the reader of today. If the Ardhakathanak is a unique witness to a particular time in the history of India and the world, it is equally a remarkable statement about the timelessness of human experience, as felt in such moments as the cloying taste of remorse, the beauty and strength of friendship, the frustrating difficulty of making one’s way in life, and the unbearable—yet somehow borne—tragedy of parental bereavement. Despite its remoteness in time (for all modern readers) and also in place (for those of us living outside northern India), Banarasi’s tale makes frequent and profound contact with our own experiences. We are constantly drawn in to the story, and readers who approach the text with an open attitude will find many and profound correspondences with their own lives. We may not have thrown manuscripts of love poetry into a flowing river as Banarasi did in a fit of moral conscience; and we may never have stolen money from our parents to finance the excitements of an illicit love-affair: but most of us have known bereavement, the excitements of love and perhaps of scholarship, and the ups and downs of life’s fortunes in terms of health, wealth and happiness. On all these matters, and many more, Banarasi shares his experiences with us openly and candidly. At times he seems philosophical in his acceptance of the inevitability of fate, seeing in it the inexorable
consequences of actions in earlier lives; at other times his misfortunes rile him, and he shows himself to be fully human when he grumbles about the many discomforts he has to endure. His ability to make these experiences matter to us lies in his poetic craft—in his techniques for making his story immediate and alive. Banarasidas the man has much to share with us; and Banarasidas the poet has a natural talent for narrative, always seeming to offer precisely the right detail of an event for the reader’s imagination be able to fill in the picture around it.

  An example of skilful story-telling comes in the passage in which Banarasi describes the social and domestic unrest that followed the death in Agra of the emperor Akbar. The year was CE 1605 (or Vikram Samvat 1662 in the dating system of the period), and our poet was a nineteen-year-old living at the family home in Jaunpur. Banarasi chooses two narrative strands with which to weave this part of his story—a personal one involving his family, and a social one reflecting the perspective of the town’s merchant community to which his family belonged. When the news of Akbar’s death reached Jaunpur, Banarasi was at home sitting on the steps of his family courtyard. Shocked by what he heard, he fainted and tumbled to the ground, hitting his head on the stonework of the stairway or the floor as he did so; the courtyard ‘turned red with his blood’ (verse 250), and the house echoed to the sound of weeping and wailing. Banarasi’s parents were frantic. His mother was the more composed of the two parents in a family calamity (some things remain constant across the centuries: the female is ever more practical than the male when crisis strikes!). She quickly took control of the situation: she applied a piece of burnt cloth to the wound, both staunching and sterilizing it with this traditional remedy; and through her tears, she prepared a bed for her son and lay him carefully upon it.