A Half Story: Banarasidas's 'Ardhakathanak'

The first autobiography in an Indian language

It was more than three hundred and eighty years ago, in the winter of 1641, in Agra, that Banarasidas, merchant, poet, philosopher, and Jain spiritual thinker, completed the writing of a unique and remarkable text. The Ardhakathanak, as this text is known, is the story of Banarasidas’s own life.

When he wrote his story, Banarasidas was fifty-five years o…